Anarchy As Art
by Lomonaaeren
Summary: HPDM slash. Draco's a master thief and illegal Potions brewer. Harry is the Auror assigned to hunt him. A cat and mouse game. With endless tension. COMPLETE.
1. Anarchy's Inner Workings

**Title: **Anarchy as Art

**Disclaimer: **J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.

**Rating: **R

**Pairing: **Harry/Draco

**Warnings: **Flangst, violence, sex, UST.

**Summary: **Draco is a master thief who also sells Dark Arts lessons and illegal potions on the side. Harry is the Auror assigned to catch him. The chase turns into a cat-and-mouse game. With sexual tension.

**Author's Notes: **At the moment, I don't know how long this story will be. It will be fairly light, with short chapters, but this could also mean that it'll be fairly long.

**Anarchy as Art**

_Chapter One-Anarchy's Inner Workings_

"Aurors!"

Ron yelled that a moment after Harry had already broken down the door and charged in. Harry didn't mind, though. The shout should add to the confusion and make Valerie Linton's escape all the more impossible.

Bright colors exploded around him, accompanied by puffs of smoke. Harry heard Ron holding his breath and then letting it go to call out a warning, but he ignored that. He had studied Linton extensively, and she relied on illusion and confusion charms to get what she wanted. He was prepared to ignore most of what he saw until it proved that it could physically hurt him.

He saw a bright robe flicker out of the corner of his vision, and dived after it. Something physical and solid-seeming shone in front of him, but Harry smiled; he had seen this web spell in action once before, at the site of Linton's last escape, and it could never deceive him now. He simply spun forwards, to the side, as he cast a sight-enhancing enchantment on his eyes, and the web seemed to break apart in half-sliced glittering strands.

It had never been there. But now it was unlikely to trip up Ron, either, who was scrambling into the corridor behind him. Harry ran ahead, after that robe that was now turning corners towards the back escape route they had identified before surrounding the house.

He ran straight into a glamour of absolute darkness. But the Aurors had undergone blind-fighting training for a reason, and Harry shut his eyes and listened. He heard rapid breathing to one side and whirled towards it, lashing out with his wand in much the same way he had when he cut the glamour of the net.

Linton shrieked as his Stunner caught her along the side, though from the shriek itself and the thumping footsteps, Harry knew that his spell hadn't hit her straight on. But she was stumbling as she ran, and he called, "_Expelliarmus!"_ in the comfortable knowledge that he was close enough to her for it to work.

The wand that flew into his hand a moment later hummed with hostile magic, but from the moment he had stolen his first wand, Harry had never let that bother him. He wielded both together, and the last remains of the glamour tore away.

Ron stepped forwards beside him and cast a Tripping Jinx at the fleeing Linton, now fully visible.

She fell, and Ron bound her. Harry grinned at him and then looked up abruptly as he smelled smoke. There was another room down the corridor, from which fire was flaring up against the walls. This was an older manor, the sort that got abandoned as pure-blood families died out and also tried to conceal their property from the Ministry, and made of wood.

Harry and Ron traded a single glance that set up their plan in seconds, and then Ron knelt down on Linton's back and made sure the ropes around her wrists were tight while Harry leaped towards the fire.

He was already chanting Moistening Charms as he came through the door, but he stopped when he saw the source of the fire. A single, glowing ward was coiled around several trunks full of papers. It was burning only them, ignoring the wooden furniture scattered around the trunks and even the scarred table with potentially explosive Potions ingredients on it.

Harry had seen wards like that before. They were the inventions of a particular accomplished thief.

Well, an accomplished thief whom he believed existed and whom the Ministry kept insisting was only rumor.

With a slight, grim smile, Harry cast the spell he had invented that would disrupt the ward by getting underneath it and biting it in half. The fire stopped at once, and while the stink of singed paper filled the air, Harry was sure that _some _valuable things had been left undamaged. It would be good if Linton's Potions recipes were among them, he thought as he stepped forwards. The Ministry had been unable to duplicate a few of her potions, even knowing which Dark ingredients she was stealing.

He picked up the first sheaf of parchment after making sure there were no hexes on it, and went still.

Not recipes at all. Letters. And with a particular dashing, curling signature at the end of them, the signature of the man Harry was sure was behind the most high-profile thefts in modern wizarding history, either directly or by training other thieves like Linton in his methods.

Harry licked his lips. He had to be careful. He had to be certain. Some people in the Ministry had accused him of an "unfortunate obsession" the last time Harry had brought up that name. He turned the paper to the side and began casting the charms that should reveal whether the signature had been charmed or changed in any way.

By the time Ron had searched Linton and removed all the lockpicks, false wands, timed charms, potential Portkeys, and knives she carried with her, Harry knew the signature was real, and that he was holding the evidence that he might need to persuade the Head Auror that a targeted chase would yield real profits.

The paper shook in his hand, and he closed his eyes and shook his head in return. When he looked again, his hand was steady.

This was too important. He wasn't going to lose the chance. He would act like a rational adult, and let Ron present the evidence.

Despite the primal, roaring thing in his chest that demanded he be the one to do so.

Because this was _too _important. At this point, Harry knew, the bastard probably trained half the thieves that the Aurors pursued for the most important thefts, and more who traded their skills for others or sold illegal potions on the sly or Potions ingredients on the black market. The evil that he did spread around him in concentric rings. He did nothing as intensely Dark as Voldemort had, but that didn't really matter, at least not to Harry. He had learned about the harm that other people could cause without meaning to. This was someone who knew what he was doing, but did not care, as long as the Galleons flowed into his account.

Someone with a respectable public reputation to this point, at least on paper.

Well, here was the paper that proved he might not have it for long, Harry thought as he gazed at the signature of Draco Malfoy.

* * *

"Linton isn't talking."

Harry glanced up from the paperwork in front of him and gave Ron a faint, hard smile. "Well, she wouldn't, would she? Not when she tried to burn that correspondence. Malfoy probably threatened her with being chopped up and posted back to her relatives over several years if she didn't conceal their connection."

Ron sighed and took his own seat. Harry turned back to the report. He didn't particularly like "justifying the use of Ministry resources," as the Head Auror thought was the purpose of these reports, but anything was preferable to another of Ron's lectures about how some criminals would escape, and they should concentrate on the ones they were able to arrest and not the ones they weren't.

This time, though, Ron surprised him.

"I thought your obsession with Malfoy was just that," he said slowly. "You thinking that he was still just as bad as his father had always been, only without a You-Know-Who to serve. But I have to admit, those letters..." He shook his head. "It's all there. The answers to questions she asked, and giving her information about sources of illegal trade goods."

Harry lifted the report to his face this time to hide his grin. "Don't worry, Ron," he said. "I will still remember all three times that you were right about Malfoy and not hold this against you."

"It's just that it seems stupid for him to take those risks," Ron said. He fussed with the papers on his desk, and then dropped them and stared at the wall. Harry knew he was doing that without looking at him, because Ron always did when he thought about the war. "When he was barely acquitted and there are still people in the Ministry who'll always be suspicious of him and his family."

Harry lowered the report and stared. "Besides me, who was suspicious? That's what you told me, that no one had a right to suspect him because he'd kept himself clean since the war."

Ron fussed with the papers some more. Then he said, "It's not-it does seem _awfully _convenient that we found the letters in the first place. Why would he write to Linton? Why not contact her by firecall?"

Harry shrugged. "Perhaps he never wanted her to see his face. Perhaps it would have told her too much about his house. Look, Ron, if you can prove the letters aren't real, then we could concentrate on other things. But at the moment, it's _evidence_. We can't ignore it just because we don't like it or it doesn't make sense. We couldn't figure out what dragon eggshells were doing in Dominetti's manor either, remember? We couldn't think anyone would be stupid enough to actually _hatch _them."

Ron leaned back, hooking his feet under the desk in the way that Hermione hated when he did it with the tables at home, and stared at Harry. Harry stared back, raising his eyebrows slightly.

"You must be thrilled with this," Ron said at last. "You've never trusted him."

Harry gave him a thin smile back. "Because there were one too many sly remarks, and he kept the Dark Mark when he could have removed it with that potion they invented a few years ago. And those owls he sent me for the first two years after the war?" Harry shook his head. "I would have understood insults hurried at me. It can't be easy for him that I testified to save his arse. But all those hints about crimes that happened the next day? Deniability or not, I still don't believe that much in coincidence."

"You really are a suspicious bastard sometimes," Ron said, but it might have been admiration.

Harry raised his teacup to him and turned back to finishing the report. A moment later, Ron did the same thing, and the companionable scratching of quills filled the silence.

Harry was glad he had a lot of paperwork to finish this afternoon, all of it relevant to Linton's capture. It would keep his hands from shaking, or itching to toss in a handful of Floo powder and call the Head Auror's office every few minutes.

_Is it enough evidence for us to go after him? When will we _know_? Can you please hurry up and give us an answer?_

Harry snorted and laid the report aside to dry before he took it across to Ron to get his counter-signature. Asking questions like that would only make Head Auror Thorin view Harry with more suspicion than he already did about why he was so eager to see Malfoy dragged down.

Harry knew that he couldn't share the real reasons. Those were private and silly and had a lot to do with disappointment that Malfoy hadn't wanted to do something _else _with his life after the war, rather than repeat his father's mistakes. But as long as Harry didn't have the proof, he couldn't move against him, and his Auror ethics were stronger than the personal reasons.

But now...

_You fucked up, Malfoy._

* * *

"I'm granting you your wish, Potter."

Harry just nodded, and said nothing. That was the best course when dealing with Head Auror Thorin, really. He was so slow and cautious that it took him forever to make up his mind, but when he did make it up, he fell too heavily in that particular direction for anyone to change it. He wasn't the best choice for a Head Auror, but he had been the most senior Auror after the war who wasn't implicated in serving Voldemort or casting Unforgivable Curses on people, and once such people were in such jobs, they tended to stay there.

Thorin frowned at the letter in front of him and shook his head. He was a tall man with dark eyes and dark hair that he kept cut absolutely straight; Harry hadn't missed the glances he always got for his own hair whenever he entered the office. He had a long black beard, too, as curly as his head wasn't, that Harry thought he must tuck into his belt. He reached out a heavy hand, with a scar around the ring finger that Harry had always wanted to ask him about, and tapped the signature.

"We've done every spell we can think of," he announced. "Nothing makes the signature change. Nothing shows that it was forged. And it matches the signatures that were current on the donation forms Malfoy turned in last week."

Harry ducked his head to hide his smile. Malfoy had probably taken a risk, the way he had with those owls to Harry in the first two years after the war, and counted on Linton being able to burn the letters in time. He hadn't managed.

"You're to work on it alone, not involving Auror Weasley."

Harry blinked and glanced up, only to find Thorin watching him as if anticipating the objection. Harry didn't make the one that the man would probably have expected him to, therefore. "Are you sure that I'll be safe on a case this dangerous without a partner, sir? Malfoy is clever."

Thorin grunted, the kind of grunt he gave when someone had squirmed out of his traps, and tapped the letter again. "I want to keep the investigation as secret as possible until we know _why _Malfoy has escaped capture this long. We don't want the Ministry looking like a lot of fools to the public. If you investigate him alone, we can say that's a long-standing grudge and nothing to do with us. But Weasley's forte isn't secrecy."

Harry nodded. He had expected that arse-covering move, really. There was nothing the Ministry did better. "All right, sir. Is there any place that you'd like me to begin?"

Thorin scowled, picked up the letter, and seemed to weigh ripping it up before he threw it back at Harry. "No. Do what you think best. Talk to Linton, interview other people, track the thefts you think he's been involved in. Just find the evidence we need and drag him in. We can't have people _laughing _at the Ministry."

Harry nodded solemnly back, and then picked up the letter. He would look through Linton's other captured documents and see whether there was anything else there he could use. "Any advice or injunctions, sir?"

"No." Thorin stared at Harry so long that Harry thought he might contradict himself and offer some after all, but he waved his hand at the door and turned back to what looked like his own unfinished report. Harry suspected that he was the only one in the Department of Magical Law Enforcement who enjoyed writing them. They were solid and didn't change much, unlike people.

Harry stepped out into the corridor and half-closed his eyes, feeling his nostrils flare as if he were a hound sniffing along a trail. It was nice to have official permission for his private crusade at last.

"Potter."

All the muscles along Harry's spine stiffened, and he took a step forwards with an effort. Then he thought, _Why not? _and turned around. There was no reason for Malfoy to know that this encounter between them was any different than normal, unless he already knew about Linton's capture and suspected that she hadn't burned his letters. Making sure to hold the parchment so Malfoy couldn't see the signature, Harry gave him a mocking little bow. "Your Lord High and Mightiness."

Malfoy smiled. Sometime in the last few years, despite being like his father in so many other ways, he had learned to drop the smirk, had cut his hair, and sometimes appeared in clothes other than formal dress robes. He wore some now, a shiny silver set that Harry thought wouldn't have disgraced Dumbledore with a few stars added to them. He stepped forwards and held out his hand.

"You're the only one who recognizes me for what I really am, Harry," he said. "Such a rare honor."

Harry bared his teeth and let his hand slap Malfoy's wrist lightly. No chance of touching his palm and absorbing a skin-contact poison like the one that had nearly disabled him on the Ammler case. "I wouldn't have thought that was a _good _thing."

"Ah, but don't all of us crave a moment of recognition?" Malfoy took a step closer to him, bending his head in, so that all Harry could see was his face, and especially those bright eyes and bared teeth. "Especially if we go without it so often? Because of the masks others place on our faces? I had thought that you, of all people, would understand that impulse."

Harry had a moment when he felt as if he was standing on the edge of a high building. Sometimes he did that and had the urge to jump over just to see what would happen. His adrenaline choked him-

And if he stood here much longer, he would probably say something that would prove he was hunting Malfoy.

He swept a bow, using the gesture to move himself out of Malfoy's space. "The press does recognize me for what I did," he murmured. "Slayer of Voldemort, hero, Chosen One, best Auror in the department, haven't you heard?"

Malfoy gave him a smile slow enough to make Harry want to lunge at him. "And that's all you are, then?" he asked. "And they never make mistakes? I reckon _I _must have made one, then. My apologies."

And he turned and strolled away, leaving Harry too breathless for professionalism.

_Remember, _he told himself as he hurried back to the office, _find the right amount of evidence on him and you'll never have to see him again. Except at the trial._


	2. Begin at the Beginning

Thank you again for the reviews!

_Chapter Two—Begin at the Beginning_

The first thing he would have to do to satisfy his critics, Harry knew, was find _some _evidence that Malfoy knew the Dark Arts he had trained other wizards like Linton in, and knew the techniques of thievery. Though some people like the Weasleys might mutter about what thieves the Malfoys always had been, they didn't mean it literally, and others would ask why someone who stole money always had so much to give away in charitable excess.

Harry knocked smartly on the door in front of him, and then waited, listening in some amusement to the shuffling of papers behind it. Some junior Aurors treated him as if he were Thorin and had strict standards he'd enforce on others. Harry had discovered that time, and nothing else, was the cure for that. They never believed him if he tried to reassure them that he didn't care about sharp corners to paper stacks or whether everyone's collars were buttoned properly.

Finally, a flushed face appeared around the door, and the young Auror it belonged to cleared her throat. "Um, sorry, Auror Potter," she said. "_Do _come in."

Harry nodded, smiled, and accepted the invitation, saying over his shoulder, "Auror Margaret Flowing, wasn't it?" He glanced at her partner, searched his memory, and was grateful when it came to him, although the dark-haired man gripping his robes in front of Harry now didn't much resemble the pimple-faced trainee Harry had worked with three years ago. "And _Auror _Philip Wing. Congratulations on making it through the training program."

Wing flushed deeply himself and stared at the ground. "I know that you didn't think I would," he murmured. "But—"

"It was never your talent I doubted," Harry said firmly. "Just your dedication." He considered Wing, decided that he could risk the joke, and smiled. "To something other than drinking endless bottles of Firewhisky, I mean."

Wing opened his mouth, then recognized the humor and grinned. "Yes, sir," he said. "I think that you'll find all the notes on the prisoner in order." He nodded at the table, and sure enough, the sheets of parchment all had their edges aligned with each other.

"And there's a cup of tea waiting for you, sir," Flowing said anxiously, gesturing at the other corner of the table, where it steamed. "We weren't sure how you liked it, so we left—oh, _everything _for you, sir."

Indeed, Harry could make out containers of sugar, cream, milk, and several things that he was sure no one sane put in their tea, like poppy seeds. But it would be ill-natured to make fun of people who had tried so hard to attend to his comfort, so he just nodded to Flowing. "Thank you. I'm sure I'll manage."

Flowing looked around then, as if counting the air molecules in the room, and Harry raised his eyebrows, wondering what troubled her. But then Flowing took a deep breath and faced him, and said, "Sir, regulations say that your partner is supposed to be here with you."

_Oh_. Harry did hope that his own presence was causing this all by itself, and that Thorin's stiffness wasn't beginning to affect the people who should be best-prepared to resist it. "I know that, Auror Flowing, but Auror Weasley will not be helping me on this case, by explicit orders of the Head Auror."

Flowing frowned at him, ignoring the way that Wing made shushing motions at her. Harry could see a gleam of Hermione back in her eyes. "He didn't inform us of this, sir. And surely you should speak to Linton with your partner there, since you captured her together?"

Harry let his smile shift a shade, to colder than he would use to anyone except most Dark wizards. "Feel free to go to Head Auror Thorin and ask him for the truth if you don't trust me, Auror."

Finally, Flowing seemed to realize that doubting Harry Potter's word might not be the best route to peace and harmony among her colleagues. Her face turned so crimson that Harry thought he might have to leap forwards and catch her for a second; then she turned away and said softly, "I'm sorry, Auror."

"You show a strong devotion to the rules," Harry said, and waved them out of the room. They went, Wing with his hand low on Flowing's back in a way that made Harry pause and think of another reason it might have taken them some time to open the door.

Left alone, he skimmed through the notes, but they were all either things he knew already or unimportant confessions to small thefts from Linton. She seemed cooperative now, as she hadn't been yesterday—to a point. Then again, no one had yet asked her in any detail about Malfoy.

Harry took a moment to close his eyes and think, settling his memory and his expectations into place for the coming interrogation. He had ruined some early ones with his impatience to demand confessions and his eagerness to accept everything that he wanted to hear at face value. But truth was more important than someone's prejudices or perceptions. And to catch Malfoy, he would need the truth, or his own prejudices would cloud the verdict for most people who knew about his grudge.

His senses sharpened to the point that he could smell the spices in the tea and feel the ridges and cracks in the table under his fingers. Harry opened his eyes and nodded. He was ready.

* * *

When he stepped into the interview room that contained Linton, sitting on a comfortable high-backed chair with her arms linked together in front of her with unbreakable bonds, she smiled at him and said, "So they're sending Harry Potter to interview me. I'm honored."

Harry smiled back at her and took the time to pull up his own chair, turning it around so he could squat over the seat and fold his arms on the back. By the time he sat down, Linton's lip had begun to curl, and she was sitting up to focus on him.

Harry grinned at her and launched the blow that would seize on the weakness of her contempt and use it to crack the lies she might have prepared. "How long have you been corresponding with Draco Malfoy?"

Linton's mouth shook open, and then she clamped her lips shut and said, "I'm not. You don't have any proof that I am." But her face had gone pale, and Harry knew that, in a Pensieve memory he could present to the Wizengamot, wouldn't be convincing as a demonstration of complete innocence.

Harry reached down and slowly produced, moving his hand as if reluctant to show anyone else the signature, one of Linton's letters with the flourishing name clearly visible.

Linton shut her eyes and took a deep breath, which she seemed to think might help her regain her mental balance. She hadn't succeeded; there were still too many lines in her face when she looked at him again. "It's true that I wrote to someone who used that name," she said. "But that doesn't mean that it _was _him. I never saw his face."

"What reasons do you have for thinking that it wasn't him?" Harry let hope leak into his voice and sat up straight.

Linton responded, giving him the faint, superior smile she had worn when he first entered the room. "What need would a philanthropist have to instruct other people in brewing illegal potions, or stealing exotic ingredients, or whatever else you're going to specifically charge me with? He had money of his own. Nothing he needed that I could provide."

"The interesting thing," Harry said, tapping his fingers against the letter and staring at the far wall, "the _interesting _thing, is that we found out the same things about your family, when we investigated _them_. Wealthy, able to purchase their own potions and ingredients for anything they wanted, or at least contract the services of others instead of taking the risks themselves. One might say that you and whoever you wrote to are kindred spirits." He turned his head and locked eyes with Linton.

Linton's hands clamped on the arms of the chair. Harry watched her mind ticking over, and nodded a little in confirmation of the question she hadn't asked him yet. _Yes, it is that bad. We found everything. _Everything.

"I'm not—you're mistaken," Linton said, but her voice cracked. "It's a common mistake, to think that I'm related to the wealthy pure-blood Lintons, when the name is common—I mean, it's shared—I'm not who you think I am."

"Miss Linton," Harry said, and let his voice sink into the chiding tone that he'd heard so many times from McGonagall, "the Ministry has records of your birth, your education, your training, and your licensing as an apprentice to a Potions master a few months before you abruptly disappeared and the thefts started to happen. We _know _you are who we say you are. The Ministry records glowed in your presence, which wouldn't have happened if we were dealing with someone who happened to be—a cousin, would you say? That's a deception that must have been useful to you several times, but we know you. One learns so much about someone else from reading their personal letters."

Linton stared at him, as still as the glamours of stone walls and fathomless pools that she had created more than once to hide herself.

Harry sighed and unfolded the next letter. "This is the letter that Mr. Malfoy wrote to you, telling you that he understood and sympathized with your boredom. The war wasn't an opportunity for either of you; you were too young for it, and he was on the wrong side, and helpless in the face of events. But you don't want the perfect, boring life that living within the law seemed to promise, either. So you chose to do something that would give you exposure to the Dark Arts, and the excitement that you'd been craving, and the attention of others, if not the approval. It's all there. I can understand it. I don't approve of it, of course, but I understand." This time, he made sure his smile was gentle. "There are times that I've been tempted to escape the trap I was born into myself, though preferably with a glamour instead of thefts."

Linton closed her eyes and shook her head. "That's still no proof that he is who you think he is," she whispered.

"Really? When he writes details about the Malfoy family and properties that only a Malfoy should know?" Harry raised his eyebrows in polite disbelief. "If it isn't him, then he has a spy within his house, someone who can come and go through the wards at will, and we should tell Mr. Malfoy at once so he can better guard his home."

The only sound was Linton's breath hissing steadily through her tightly clenched teeth. Harry waited. He had little _natural _patience, but for something like this, for something that might ultimately lead to Malfoy reconsidering his stupid little games and behaving as he should have done all along? Harry could have waited two days for her to say something.

"You don't know," Linton whispered. "The letters could be false."

"To cast doubt on Mr. Malfoy's reputation?" Harry leaned back in his chair and pretended to consider that. "Perhaps. But what is the purpose of the details, then? The letter could have been much less intimate and personal and still been enough to interest us in Mr. Malfoy's….pristine reputation."

Unexpectedly, Linton laughed, and her eyes snapped open. "You should have seen the ones that burned," she gasped. "The way he would talk about how there were so few friends or enemies or apprentices worth having in this world, and you would know when you found the one that would complement you. You might need to spend a long time working until that person acknowledged your existence, but that was fine. You could _never_ give up, though."

"So, he mentored you in the selection of your enemies as well as your Potions ingredients?" Harry asked, because he didn't know what other question to begin with.

Linton leaned forwards as much as she could with the binding spells that hovered around her and prevented sudden movements. "He chose you. He talked about you. He was content with your distant attention for a long time, but someday, he said, he'd lure you closer, and focus on you, and turn you."

Harry stared at her for long moments. Then he shook his head and said, "If he said that to you, then you're admitting that he was Mr. Malfoy, or that you had reason to think so. You think he was talking about a rivalry that some people believe us to have possessed in the past?"

Linton sighed and let her head fall back against the chair. "I can't lie that well if you have all the evidence," she muttered. "So I might as well tell you. It would be different if the letters had burned."

"Yes," Harry said, watching her. "It would be."

Linton rolled one shoulder up, then looked at Harry with an intensity that made him feel as though she would have liked to bind _him _up and ask him much the same questions he was asking her. "I hope he wins," she said. "I hope that he destroys you and leaves you yearning after him the same way that—that you leave me yearning to be free right now. It would be a fitting revenge for me."

"Considering that you can't go anywhere at the moment, I don't blame you for exercising the only freedom left to you, in wishing," Harry said, calm and polite, attentive.

Linton's smile crept across her face like poison. "Yes, I can see why he hates you so much," she murmured. "Or used to. You're enough to make someone want to _force _you to engage, instead of retreating behind a mask of distance."

Harry held her eyes, and smiled, and waited. Silence had worked once before, and she had just revealed that she hated it when he responded to her like a mature adult. Why in the world wouldn't he use that tactic against her?

Linton looked away and began to speak. Harry scribbled industrious notes. They related only to the letters that she had received from Malfoy, and told him nothing that they wouldn't have been able to prove with the correspondence itself, but a willing confession meant a great deal, and was the start of any firm investigation into someone like Malfoy, who corrupted others as a first line of defense.

When Harry stood, Linton watched him with eyes that had as much peace in them as Nagini's and said, "I hope he wins."

"Don't all students wish the same thing for their mentors?" Harry asked, still peaceful as always, and turned away to compare the notes to the ones that lay on the table in the other room, ignoring the curse that Linton spat at his back.

* * *

"Potter. I should have known you favored places so ordinary."

Harry kept his eyes on the notes spread out over the table in front of him, ignoring the way that his heart was suddenly bounding, and trying to drive him out of his seat. So he would react like that when Malfoy appeared. It couldn't be helped—at the moment—but he could control the reactions that came further down the chain. "Yes, you should have, when I've been coming here ever since the war," he said, and sipped at a cup of butterbeer in front of him. Tom didn't care about Harry taking up a table in the Leaky Cauldron at all hours; he paid well for the privilege and his presence discouraged some of the wilder sort who might otherwise have been tempted to make the pub a frequent base.

Malfoy dropped into the seat across from him, never glancing at the notes, though of course he might have done it without Harry noticing. His eyes had the color of silver this morning, echoing the robes he once again wore, though they were a shade or two paler than the flashy ones of the other day. He flicked his fingers, and a knife appeared between them for a moment. Then it vanished.

Harry watched him, and ignored the flush in his own face. So Malfoy might have tried to stab him. He could have hexed him before that happened. Malfoy might have heard rumors about Harry's speed, but no one who hadn't actually seen him in battle could understand the consequences of it.

"An extraordinary man in ordinary places," Malfoy said, as if he was quoting something. He leaned back in the chair and let the knife walk along his knuckles. His smile was lazy, languid, leopard-like. "That could be the motto of your life, couldn't it?"

"Hogwarts isn't what I'd call ordinary, even for our world." Harry looked back at his notes and drew a small star next to the information that Malfoy was arrogant even for someone who had been getting away with crimes under a façade of normality.

"Compared to you? It is."

"Well, if you think about the sum total of the students who have been through its doors," Harry said, looking up and preventing himself from flinching or turning away as Malfoy's eyes met his, "perhaps you're right. Dumbledore was a student there. Snape. Tom Riddle." Malfoy's smile dimmed the smallest amount. _Right. Voldemort can still cow him. _"You."

"You think I'm extraordinary?" Malfoy let out a long sigh with a little, whistling, indignant huff at the end of it. "I'm not. Once you understand everything about me, you can predict my every move. I'm _complicated, _perhaps, in the same way that a good chess game is. But when you sit down and try to figure it out, you can. While you…a man with fame who doesn't take advantage of it, a man with power who isn't Head Auror, a rule-breaker who obeys those he wants to. A man with magic _breathing _around him, who's content to go into an office every day and earn the same measly amount of Galleons they pay every other Auror. That's what I call a conundrum."

Harry gave him a thin smile, and said nothing. Malfoy had fallen into the same trap so many others did, despite Linton's claims about his intellect and Malfoy's own overestimation of his powers. Harry didn't have more magic than anyone else. He was just good at the flashier kinds, like Defense and some curses. He hadn't mastered half the household charms that Hermione and Ron knew, or the useful little things that could dry your hair or heal a scrape or lift a stack of heavy objects without unbalancing them. He was good at being an Auror, and maybe obsessing about Malfoy, and that was all.

Malfoy caught his eye and leaned forwards across the table, his hand clamping down on Harry's. His face seemed to blaze, with a still, settled fire that Harry thought might be more dangerous than the flickering kind.

"You'll believe me, before the end," he said. "I'll _make _you see."

"I'm sure," Harry said, bucking his wrist free with a hard little shake, "that you wouldn't want to be guilty of assault on an Auror." He could feel something small and hard between his fingers, falling to the table with a flick. His hand still covered it in the position he'd assumed, but he stared at Malfoy, willing some reaction.

The flickering fire had come back, the lazy smile. Malfoy bowed his head, murmured a response that had no consonants in it, and left the pub with an easy stride that caused heads to turn as he passed.

Harry shook his own and stared down at the table.

There lay a small stone, shaped like an arrowhead, and alive with shifting bands of red and yellow and purple. Harry recognized it at once: one of the Brindled Centaur Opals, stolen last year in a spectacular and still mysterious fashion from one of the central glass cases in France's Wizards' Museum.

Of course, by the time that Harry bolted to his feet and out the door, and looked wildly around in search of Malfoy, the bastard was already gone. Harry clutched at the opal, his hand flexing so hard he wouldn't have been surprised to crush the stone.

_Bastard. So he wants to make this a game, does he? Then it's checkmate, and no quarter given until he's taken._

_And _he'll _be the one it happens to. Not me._


	3. A Crime Rich as Opals

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Three—A Crime Like Opals_

"It is not enough proof by itself to merit an arrest yet," Thorin said out of the fire, his voice so heavy that Harry was tempted to pick up a flagstone and throw it at the wall just so that it would crack the plaster. Of course, that would happen in his own house and not Thorin's office, so it wouldn't be worth it. "So he had one of the opals. He might have bought them once they were stolen, not stolen them himself."

Harry sat back and closed his eyes. He knew that he could get away with that because Thorin actually approved of people who did all the stupid little tricks that anger management trainers recommended, like counting to ten in their heads.

Of course, Harry didn't think Thorin knew that he was mentally resisting the temptation to beat the Head Auror's skull in in this case, not so much the frustration that he couldn't yet go after Malfoy.

But it made sense when he looked at it logically, and he had only himself to blame for rushing to Thorin right now. The bastard wouldn't move until and unless they had proof flowing over their desks and out of their ears, preferably in proper memo and report format. One opal didn't prove anything.

_Except that Malfoy really does want to bait me along his trail, the way Linton said he did._

Harry shook his head in slow self-censure. He hadn't paid enough attention to that statement. Malfoy was an adult, had run his thoughts, and adults didn't cling to the grievances and grudges of their childhoods. Linton must have misunderstood his motive, or else Malfoy's plan involved getting revenge on Harry as only an incidental part of something much larger, much _grander_.

But nothing bound Malfoy to consider that motive as ridiculous, if he wanted to exercise it. And Malfoy had had Snape for a mentor, who _had _clung to his grudges in exactly that way, and for exactly the most ridiculous of reasons.

"Yes, sir, that's true," Harry said at last, looking up. Thorin's head still waited in the fire. The Head Auror had got his job, Harry sometimes thought, _because _he was so good at waiting—on people and events and politicians. "But surely buying stolen property is a crime in and of itself, and worthy of arrest?"

Thorin wagged one finger at Harry. "We can _question _him, Auror Potter. But we have no proof yet that would enable an arrest. After all, he was only returning the opal to a rightful authority. One could argue that that is an act of charity, like the ones he is famous for."

Harry gave a wide smile that made his cheeks ache and bared far too many of his teeth, though Thorin really didn't seem to notice that last part. "Of course, sir. Sorry, I should have realized."

"See that you think about it more carefully in the future," Thorin said, and vanished from the fire, finger still upraised. Harry leaned back on his couch and closed his eyes, spending a few moments in visions of Thorin marched out of his office in chains of paper before he could calm down and decide what he should do next.

The questioning of Linton was done, and all the other thieves they had captured whom Malfoy might have taught were months or years in Azkaban, and none had left letters behind them that pointed unquestionably to Malfoy the way Linton's had. That left Harry to wonder where the hell he ought to go next.

He wasn't an Auror for nothing, though, and a certain tension had ached in his muscles ever since Malfoy dropped the opal under his hand. Malfoy wanted to bait and lure him, did he? He thought he was so irresistible that Harry would come rushing to his side the minute he showed up to give him a hint, did he?

Then Harry would answer the bold challenge in his own bold way, and go to Malfoy Manor.

* * *

Harry couldn't get closer to the Manor than the front gates, which were made of wrought iron and led out onto a pathetically white stone drive, as though the Malfoys had spent all their money for the color of innocence. On the other hand, he didn't want to get closer, not yet. The strength of the anti-Apparition wards and other spells would tell him something in and of themselves. He landed under his Invisibility Cloak beyond the edge of the wards and walked cautiously in until he felt a hissing and spitting in front of him. Then he retreated, crouched down, and began to cast.

All the time, he spared one edge of his alertness for the tingling that would tell him of seeking spells on his Cloak that had come close to finding him. He didn't expect it—the nice thing about owning one of the Deathly Hallows, as he had found several times in the last several years, was that spells meant to detect ordinary Invisibility Cloaks didn't detect _it—_but it might still happen. Malfoy knew tricks, like that fire ward, that he must have invented himself or got out of some obscure spellbooks.

The spells danced along the edge of the wards, lighting them in a complex system of sparks that would only mean something to Harry's eye, and ought to be too pale for anyone looking down from the house to notice. The more information they conveyed to him, the more Harry felt his smile warp and stretch and twist across his face.

And Malfoy thought he was so clever.

There were wards here that would detect any sound made in the grounds and funnel it directly to one of several rooms in the Manor—Harry couldn't tell which ones, but he assumed the chambers or wings that Malfoy spent the most time in—and wards that would Transfigure any animal in the gardens into one of several battle-capable magical creatures, and wards that would bring sharp spikes out of the ground or down from the air, an innovation Harry hadn't seen before. Not to mention small, neat hexes in the realms of fire and ice, and spells that would snatch stolen objects back out of visitors' pockets, and any number of curses that could render a human into a decorative stone statue or piece of wrought iron fencing.

It would be interesting, Harry thought as he rose to his feet under the Cloak and stared at the strutting white peacocks that could become stalking tigers in an instant, if Malfoy was responsible for kidnapping as well as theft. How many people stood in his gardens as statues now, or were part of his fence?

"Boo."

The word came from right behind him. Harry seized iron control of himself, and that alone kept him from leaping into the air. He turned around and nodded at Malfoy, pulling his Cloak off his head. "You have better perceptions than I thought you did," he said, tucking the Cloak over his arm. No sense in hiding it when Malfoy knew it existed. "To see through a Cloak like that."

"I didn't see through it," Malfoy said, and a muscle near his mouth twitched. "That's the whole point of an Invisibility Cloak, isn't it? That one _can't _see through it?"

When Malfoy played stupid innocent like this, it most definitely meant he was up to something that he didn't want anyone to know about. Harry stared back at him, his Auror mask, the one that he used for harder interrogations than the Linton one, firmly in place, and suddenly Malfoy took a step back and laughed. The laugh was like the coming of spring.

_Don't think things like that, _Harry snarled at himself. _You don't know what the fuck he could do to you if he wanted. You know what the fuck he _is, _though, and you have no reason to forget that._

"Harry," Malfoy said, and he had calmed down and was beaming at Harry with a stupid, rapturous expression. "I always know exactly where you are. _Exactly. _You can't hide from me."

_Damn it. _Harry knew he shouldn't have worn the same robes on this expedition that he'd been wearing the other day when Malfoy found him in the Leaky Cauldron. No doubt he'd put a tracking spell on them, and Harry didn't find it.

It would have to have been a good one, to fool the wards on his house into ignoring its presence, but that didn't matter. Harry should still have found it. No reason to blame Malfoy or Thorin when it was easier to blame himself.

Malfoy leaned forwards, as if something about his latest volley hadn't gone to his satisfaction and he wanted a better look at Harry's face. "What's the matter with you? I would expect a smart answer to that by now." He paused, then added, "Or a dumb one. I wouldn't want to tax your efforts."

"There's no reason for me to give you what you expect," Harry said, and decided that he might as well drop a phrase from Linton's letters into the mix. Did Malfoy know yet how much evidence they had on him, how serious the hunt was this time? He must not, or he wouldn't have dared come so close to Harry and say such incriminating things. "Don't you thrive on 'what's least expected, what throws you into the air and shows you that you always land on your feet'?"

Silence. Malfoy's eyebrows crept up towards his hairline. Holding his gaze, Harry found that he felt strange, as though he had made a promise and then broken it, or as if Malfoy had done the same thing.

Then Malfoy blinked, and laughed again, and the gaze released him. "Well, yes, I do," Malfoy said, as if admitting to a minor bad habit, like smoking a low-class brand of tobacco. "But, following in the traces of the conversations we've had so far, I wouldn't have expected you to oblige me with _that_, either. What reason should you have to want to see me thrive?"

This was it, the only chance Harry thought he would ever have to explain to Malfoy why he didn't _want _to chase him. He folded his arms and maintained his silence so long that Malfoy stopped shifting from foot to foot.

"I want to see you thrive as what I know you can be," Harry said quietly. "Intelligent and good at potions and someone who's learned from your mistakes. You told me you had after the trial, and, fool that I was, I believed it. I was sure that you would make a life for yourself that had nothing to do with blood purity nonsense or the kinds of crimes that your father committed under Voldemort." There, a minute flinch cracked the perfect surface of Malfoy's composure. Harry wasn't surprised. If all this bad behavior came from unhealed war wounds, references to Voldemort would surely still usnettle him. "But you didn't. You decided that the Dark Arts and _illegal _potions were for you, not the legal ones that I know you could have made extra Galleons brewing, if you needed extra Galleons. Yes, I wanted you to thrive. But you disappointed me."

Silence stretched between them, and Malfoy blinked once and then again. Harry watched closely, but of course there was no remorse in those eyes, only more of the silence, the shock that someone would _dare _question the choices he'd made and the chances he took.

Then Malfoy moved. He tried to slam Harry up against the wrought iron gates, but Harry always knew exactly how far he was from the wards at all times and didn't allow himself to be pinned. He moved to the side instead and tried to hook his foot around Malfoy's ankle, to trip him and make him fall.

Malfoy had a knife in his hand again, but he didn't make it dance along his knuckles this time. He avoided Harry's strike as Harry had avoided his, and threw the knife instead. Harry grabbed the knife out of the air, half-turning to the side and feeling the blade catch in the trailing sleeve of his robe as he did so.

"Careful, Malfoy," he said mildly, turning around. "That's assault on an Auror, the very crime I assumed you wouldn't be eager to commit the last time we met."

"_Assume_," Malfoy said, the croak of his voice crow-like. "Yes, that's all you do about me. All this—I thought you were one of the only people who saw me as I _am_, but all you can do is stare at me through a misty maze of tears. You want me to be Gryffindor, don't you? You want me to be _innocent._ A scared little boy, not the man I've grown into. Well, I won't be your symbol of innocence, Harry Potter." Harry finally focused his eyes again, and saw Malfoy standing in front of him with his arms folded and his gaze hard as hooves. "Everything I've chosen has been for myself, not in the shadow of my father, and I intend to keep it that way."

"It really doesn't matter how we see each other," Harry said, and his voice was still calm, and although his cheeks were flushed, Malfoy was the one with the face that looked worse, the one breathing hard, the one whose hands would form fists shortly. "What matters is what you've done." He tossed the knife to Malfoy, and he caught it with a fine flash of his hands that made Harry take note. He was fast in battle, but he thought Malfoy might be close to his speed. "And if I find proof that you stole those opals, that you trained Linton, that you've sold potions and done all sorts of other things that we suspected you for, you're going to Azkaban for a long, long time."

Malfoy again stopped, as though Harry had said something as devastating as last time. His gaze sought Harry's face. Harry didn't move, didn't alter his stance or the expression he wore. What he said had been pure truth, and if Malfoy didn't like it, perhaps he should have chosen some path that didn't involve the Dark Arts.

Malfoy smiled.

The mask of the last few minutes cracked and fell away. Harry found himself taking an uncertain step backwards. He hadn't _meant _to, but abruptly it seemed as though he was the one who was on the retreat, and Malfoy who pressed forwards, shining.

_I don't think like this. Shining like what? Why am I retreating, when Malfoy is the one who's in the wrong and we both know it? _

Harry shook his head and put his hand on a small steel chain in his pocket that was meant to slice through enchantments that might be caused by smashing a potion on the ground and letting the fumes fly into the victim's nostrils. He felt no different when his hand touched it, though. Malfoy's gaze still made his blood tingle, and his face flush as that changed blood rushed into it.

"You don't understand a thing," Malfoy whispered. "What matters is what I'm doing _now, _isn't it, not the crimes in the past?"

"An Auror can only investigate a crime after it's happened, Malfoy," Harry said, but his voice didn't have the heaviness that he wanted it to have, a weight borrowed from Thorin. He sounded as though he stood on the tilting deck of a ship with the wind blowing in his ears, and he gave a single, rapid shiver.

Malfoy saw it, and he smiled with one half of his face, eyes so intent on Harry that they hurt. "But if you can find out a crime is _going _to happen, then you can stop it," he whispered. "And at the moment, I'm in the middle of planning a theft far more valuable than those opals. Do you believe it? Will you let me help you trap me?"

"There's no way that you would want to trap yourself," Harry snapped, and used that undeniable truth to recover his balance. Really, he was as foolish as Ron sometimes said he was when watching his obsession with Malfoy, to let the bastard take him off-guard like this. And to let Malfoy catch Harry spying outside his gates, as well! It was nonsense. Harry should be a better Auror than this. He was scolding Malfoy for his imperfections, but what would happen if he did so poorly in the investigation that he utterly failed to _stop _Malfoy from carrying off this theft he was talking about?

_If that was real after all, and not a delaying tactic. _

Harry met Malfoy's eyes, and his suspicion that the theft Malfoy talked about probably wasn't real died a violent death. There was too much conviction there, and too much mad delight. Of course there was. Malfoy thought he was luring Harry closer to him, there to turn him against the Ministry. He was arrogant enough to think he could pull that turning off, where no one else had ever succeeded in corrupting or bribing Harry before.

So. Real theft. Harry only had to watch out for it and prevent it from succeeding. And Malfoy would probably trap himself, leave clues all over the place for Harry to "find" and…end up making it easier to prove that he was a thief and had knowledge of the Dark Arts. Harry sighed.

Because it was in his nature to give criminals a chance to surrender, he tried one more time. "You know that we'll capture you in the end, Malfoy. You took risks, and one of them didn't pay off. You could surrender and tell us everything that we want to know, and save yourself a lot of expense and trouble."

Malfoy bounded forwards, and ended up a few inches away from Harry. Harry kept himself from flinching. His heartbeat did speed up as he remembered how isolated Malfoy Manor was from the nearest wizard dwellings, and what Malfoy might be able to do to him up here without anyone else knowing of it…

It took Harry a moment to distinguish Malfoy's hoarse words from the pounding of his heart. "You ought to know better than that. If I take risks, and you think them useless ones, well, this is just one more. But I take risks because they make me feel alive, and this is the best one. The thing I'm going to steal—I've wanted it for a long time. I've waited, I've trained and made ready, and now I'm finally sure that my skill level matches my ambition."

Harry let his teeth show in return. He longed to seize Malfoy's wand and arrest him immediately, but Malfoy could always laugh and claim he had been joking when they got to the Ministry, and at the moment, Harry had no legal cause to use Veritaserum. What would seal the investigation was catching Malfoy in the act of stealing.

But in the meantime, every memory Malfoy gave him was more grist for the Pensieve, another link in the shackles. Harry didn't have a confession yet; Thorin wouldn't let him take these intense whispers as one. But when the day came, Harry could lay those words out and show how everything had led him up to the moment when he caught Malfoy with the jewels or the keys or the Galleons in his hand.

Which led Harry to wonder what Malfoy would want to steal that he hadn't already taken at least a chance at trying to obtain.

"You're not paying attention to me, Harry. I don't _like _that."

And Malfoy lunged forwards and kissed him on the lips, light and quick and chaste and yet burning, and danced away from Harry with a mocking laugh.

He vanished. Harry felt the anti-Apparition wards open like relaxing fists, and was sure that they had snatched Malfoy back behind the walls and inside his home.

As if in a dream, Harry reached up and touched his lips, shaking his head.

_That's who I'm dealing with. A daredevil, someone who's let his own talents go to his head and believes he won't ever be caught. _

_I'll have to show him better. In the end, I run everyone to ground._


	4. Like a Fox After the Hound

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Four—Like a Fox After the Hound_

_What would Malfoy want to steal?_

Harry knew he had to turn to Malfoy's personal history for that, and it would be a hard, if interesting, challenge. The facts about Malfoy since the war were the ones everyone knew: his public apologies for what his parents had done, his donations to charities, his careful smiles in photos. He was spoken of in some places as an urbane and polished man, in others—though not in the Ministry—as someone who only pretended to make up for his past, but most people agreed that he was guarded about what he said now.

So Harry sat down with Linton's letters, and read them over.

They were remarkably unguarded, but then, given what Malfoy had said to him at the Manor gates, Harry suspected that could also be a pose. Malfoy telling him that he was about to commit a grand theft was a risk, yes, but also something he could deny, not a confession. The letters must be in a similar vein.

_Must they? When you know that he loves to run risks, that it's perhaps the one thing that he does love, and that the thefts are for the sake of that…_

Harry sighed and leaned back on his couch, running a hand through his hair. He would need to compromise; he couldn't go through the letters assuming everything was simultaneously true and a conspiracy. He would read them with an eye to risk-taking first, and then again with an eye to how Malfoy could have protected himself.

They made strange reading. Malfoy would give Linton practical Potions recipes and then spiral away into a flight of fancy about hippogriff feathers and unicorn blood, and how he would like to go hunting unicorns and convince them to give up their precious blood willingly. Harry snorted when he read that. How did Malfoy think he could do _that_, when unicorns hated and feared most humans?

_But that would be the risk of it, _Malfoy's voice whispered in his ear, as though he was still present in Harry's skull despite all those attempts to banish him. _That would be the glory of it._

Harry narrowed his eyes and scribbled a circle around the unicorn blood passage. It might be worth warning the Potions masters who worked in London to keep an eye on their stock of the precious substance, assuming anyone had any. Or perhaps Malfoy was intending to steal the herd that lived near Hogwarts.

It was several letters into the pile before Harry came across his own name, and his lip curled as he read. Malfoy really did sound like a hurt little boy who had never got over the first rejection dealt him.

_Do you know how much time I spend thinking about Harry Potter, Valerie? Far too much. I've actually made potions that can let someone else imitate the green of his eyes without Polyjuice. There are times I need to see him looking at me in a friendly manner, even if it isn't him. A few hours is usually enough._

_ Someday it won't be enough. I know that. But when that time comes, I hope you'll help me, Valerie. You and the other students I have scattered around the world, some of whom the Ministry will never find, or corrupt, or control…_

Harry snorted, and underlined the last line of _that _passage, too. It would be proof enough, for anyone reasonable, that Malfoy really had been training and corrupting people all along, spreading his skills and urging people to imitate him.

Proof for anyone reasonable. But Harry was working under Thorin. He sighed and flipped to the next letter.

This time it was some nonsensical rhapsody about how Harry worked hard and caught criminals fairly and, as annoying as it was to have them taken from Draco's tutelage when he'd spent so much time working to make them independent Dark Arts users or Potions masters, Draco would rather have his protégés caught by Harry than any other Auror. Harry rolled his eyes so hard that he thought he saw the inside of his skull. Who was Malfoy kidding? That had to be contrived, because no one who trained as many people as he did would want them caught.

_And since when did you start thinking of him as Draco?_

Harry froze. The only sound he could hear in the room was his own breathing, but it didn't matter. It _wouldn't _matter, if certain people could investigate the inside of his head.

Thorin would wonder whether his neutrality was compromised. Linton would smirk. Ron would spout his theory about how Harry's desire to catch Malfoy was a cover for something else, and…

And it was all shit that Harry had much rather not hear right now, thank you.

He managed to write down a few notes on the letter, but his hand was shaking. In the end, he put the letters aside and walked over to the nearest window to clear the air.

Harry had several enchanted windows in his house, but this one was real, a large glass window that looked out on the small part of wizarding London and the larger Muggle part near where he lived. Confusion of lights and noise or not, Harry relaxed when he looked at it. There was a world larger than he was out there, one that went on no matter what happened, one where normal people lived their lives and didn't care about irascible, rules-bound Head Aurors or paperwork or whether Harry ever caught Malfoy or not. It was good to look at when he was getting too tangled up in his own head and believed that his own efforts were of ultimate importance. It had grandeur. It had depth. It had…

Someone's head dangling down in front of it.

Harry stared. Yes, there was someone hanging there in front of his window, clinging to a rope that slowly wheeled them around. Harry started to cup his hands around his mouth to shout; his first thought was that someone had managed to hang themselves.

Then he realized the figure was upright, and held a wand in his gloved hand, lit with a glowing light. As he turned back from his latest spin, the figure winked, and the light caught on his pale face and glinted from his golden hair.

Harry's rage shattered through him like the glass that would have flown if Malfoy had actually broken the window. He aimed his wand at him and whispered the command words that would make wards spring up around him—the kind of heavy-defense wards that he had woven into the stone but only used once or twice, when someone intent on vengeance for Voldemort was chasing him.

The wards didn't leap to life and enclose Malfoy in a snare the way they should have. Harry fell back a step in response. If Malfoy had disabled them somehow, then he could come right through the window, and there was precious little that Harry could do to actually _stop _him.

"Potter," Malfoy said, his voice eerie and wind-like but otherwise clear, as if he were standing in the same room with Harry. "If you had paid attention to me when we talked, you would know what I intended to steal by now."

Harry ground his teeth into one another, probably destroying a layer of enamel the way Hermione's dentist parents were always on about, and said nothing. He knew that Malfoy's words were misdirection and bafflement and half a dozen other things tangled around each other, but not the truth. Never the truth.

"You would," Malfoy said, as if he had seen the doubt in Harry's eyes and wished to settle it. "Consider. I'm here in the dead of night, dangling from a rope that's not as secure as I would wish—" He glanced up and tugged on it, then smiled at Harry when it held. "And I had to get around some powerful wards to be here. What is it I want? What would be worth stealing here, would be worth the effort?"

_Linton's letters._

Even as the knowledge hammered through Harry like a second heartbeat, he saw Malfoy brace his feet and swing inwards. If he had defeated the heaviest protections, then he would go through the minor ones, as well, and that meant he would break the window.

Harry pivoted and dived for the table. He heard the glass crack behind him, but it didn't break just yet. Malfoy cursed in that clear voice, and Harry could hear the creak of his rope as he swung out, probably to hit it from a different angle.

Harry aimed his wand and cleared his mind. He had to ignore the sounds behind him and the fear that Malfoy would break in and snatch the letters from under his nose before he could finish the spell. This was like the Occlumency that Snape had tried to teach him, with the different (and important) result that Harry had actually managed to learn it.

"_Salutis."_

The table in front of him shimmered, and then reformed, Transfigured into an iron safe. Harry sighed hard. He knew the papers were safe; the moment of concentration had allowed him to focus on simply changing the material of the table, and so anything that wasn't made of wood on top of it would still retain its original form.

He turned around to face Malfoy just as he hit the glass full on and the air filled with sharp-edged, singing shrapnel. Harry's Shield Charm was instinctive, and the only thing he had to regret in the next moment was that Malfoy must have protected his face and hands in the same way, since nothing appeared to hit him.

Malfoy straightened up in the middle of his drawing room and glanced around, nodding. "More space than I thought you would permit yourself," he murmured. "Although you have frankly appalling tastes in décor."

Harry coiled his will tight and didn't charge. He had to admit that Malfoy had impressed him so far. He hadn't looked towards the safe, or tried to enchant it, or even looked disappointed that Linton's letters were now beyond his reach.

That must mean he had come here for another of his inane little talks. Perhaps Harry could use that against him this time, keep his temper and inspire Malfoy to tell him something that didn't have fifty separate meanings.

"You know," he said, and was proud of the calmness in his voice, "that glass is going to be a bitch to clean up."

Malfoy turned to face him now, his smile sharper than some of the shards that had flown into the walls. "Really? You forget you're a wizard more frequently than anyone I've ever known, Harry." He waved his wand, and the glass soared out of the corners and secured itself back in place thanks to a nonverbal _Reparo. _A second one, and the cracks faded into nothingness.

Harry was very aware that Malfoy had blocked the easiest path out of the room for himself, and of the pulse in his ears and under the palms of his hands. "That's what happens when you grow up with Muggles," he said, flowing with the moment, saying the first thing that came to mind because he thought it would work better that way.

Malfoy cocked his head at him. "If I had known that about you, then I would have treated you differently," he said.

Harry rolled his eyes. "Oh, of course you would have. _More _taunts about being a Gryffindor and not knowing what Quidditch was and not knowing about my past." He measured the distance between himself and Malfoy, and mentally shook his head. No, he couldn't risk a charge. They both had wands drawn, and this would leave Malfoy too much time to curse him. And given how he'd disabled the wards, he had training that Harry didn't.

"I wouldn't have assumed you knew everything already," Malfoy said, his cheeks a dusky pink and his voice soft. Harry could marvel, in a detached moment, about what a _good _actor he was. Then again, he would have to be to convince everyone in the Ministry he was a harmless do-gooder. "I would have reminded myself that growing up without magic would have made you—well, not the Boy-Who-Lived. Not the _Chosen _One. You couldn't have any idea how our world regarded you, no reason to suspect that you would have to choose sides in the war. I forced you to choose a side."

"I don't know what you're saying, Malfoy," Harry interrupted. But he did: things that he had thought to himself sometimes, under his blankets in the dark of night, waiting to fall asleep. Which meant it had to stop. "But I object to the notion that you forced me to choose a side. Voldemort did that, and I did it, too, with my ignorance. I should have seen that you weren't as bad as I wanted to think you were, that not all Slytherins were like that."

Malfoy's eyes softened further. "Well, there is something to that. We were both little shits when we were younger." Then he flashed the same kind of grin he'd shown Harry at the gates of the Manor. "But I still claim the title of being the worse little shit."

Harry's mouth moved. It took him a moment to realize that he was smiling.

Exactly as if Malfoy _wasn't _a criminal. Exactly as if Malfoy hadn't just broken into his home, Harry's sanctuary from the crazed _Prophet _reporters and readers and everyone else who thought they were entitled to a piece of his flesh.

Harry charged him.

Malfoy moved, but slowly, probably because he had never thought that someone would actually try to punish him the way he deserved as long as he was charming. He leaped backwards, and then Harry was there, slamming one fist for his midsection in the moments before his training caught up with him. _Wound a prisoner and you might just as well have handed the case to his advocate._

He changed direction and let the momentum of his arm hurl him to the carpet, well beneath any curse that Malfoy might have used. He came up on one knee, arm extended, panting so hard that he sounded like a volcano. His wand was safely in hand, and that meant he was ready to counter whatever Malfoy threw.

Malfoy stood there with one eyebrow raised, in a way that made Harry intimately aware of how he looked and sounded, grimy in comparison to Malfoy's lithe elegance. He flushed, and more so when Malfoy clucked his tongue and shook his head.

"Sometimes I wonder what I see in you, I really do," Malfoy murmured. "But it's an obsession of such long standing that it's become almost a prize of its own. I wouldn't know what to do with myself if I gave it up." He turned, and his wand began pointing at random places around the room, including, Harry was sure, the safe that held Linton's letters.

Harry lunged in a tackle for his legs, already reciting finer points of his training in his head so that he could make sure he wouldn't damage Malfoy accidentally. But Malfoy wasn't where Harry had thought he would be, lifting his legs lightly and whirling out of the way. Once again, Harry crashed on the carpet, and this time, he hit hard enough that his sight reeled when he looked up dazedly.

Malfoy knelt down next to him and ran his fingers beneath his chin. Harry stared at him, gasping, aware that he should react but not sure how he could. Perhaps Malfoy had cast a Freezing Charm when he touched him.

"I know," Malfoy whispered. "I know what it's like to have to obey the rules, and to decide that you don't want to. The only difference between us is that I made the decision not to, and you never did."

"That's stupid, Malfoy," Harry said, letting his tongue run on its own again. Malfoy must have cast a Babbling Curse on him, too. "I got in trouble all the time at Hogwarts. And you're the one who knows the pure-blood rules better than I do."

Malfoy gave him a single, mysterious smile, and stood up. "I didn't say that _some _rules weren't worth obeying. I happen to think they are. But the Auror rules that you confine your life by, the endless reports you file, the respect you have to show to people who are above you in the hierarchy only because they've known how to be mindless drones for longer…Is that what you want for your life, Harry? Really? I'm asking out of intellectual curiosity, you understand, and also desire to show you how to live again."

Harry was catching his breath now, and the pain in his head was diminishing, and he could aim his wand at Malfoy's ankles and cast a trip-line, he really could. Breaking into someone's home or flat was worthy of an arrest, at least. And Malfoy hadn't even tried to hide what he was doing.

"I think there are better things you could be doing with your life," Malfoy whispered. "And I'm just the messenger to make you realize it."

And he vanished, an Apparition so smooth and silent that Harry had to get up and go over to feel the space he'd stood to be sure it _was _an Apparition and not just a Disillusionment Charm. Well, if he had already removed the heavier wards on the building, of course there was nothing to prevent him leaving that way.

It was then that Harry turned around and saw what Malfoy had done.

The subdued beiges and blues of his home now glowed in rich greens and blues, with accents of brown earth tones. His beloved ratty old couch had new cushions that looked so soft Harry would probably fall asleep if he sat in them, and the doorway into the kitchen was wider and had an arch at the top. The fireplace had marble ornaments running along it, and a carved frieze of gamboling lions and serpents. There were landscapes on the walls—deep forests, high hills with a hint of purple on them, and meadows—that made Harry's heart ache.

And in the middle of it all was a framed photograph of Draco Malfoy, who smiled when he saw Harry and closed one eye in a lazy wink.

Harry spent the rest of the evening trying, but he never could remove that bloody photograph.

And his mood wasn't improved when he went into the bedroom and saw the new green pillows, thick white blanket, and charmed banner above the bed which proclaimed _SLYTHERINS DO IT BETTER THAN YOU THINK._


	5. Making Fools

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Five—Making Fools_

Harry hesitated before he put Linton's letters into the locked safe buried in the wall of his office. He couldn't help wondering if they would be any safer there than they would be in his home, given how easily Malfoy could break complex wards. The wards on the Ministry might actually be a degree of magnitude less difficult than the ones Harry had set up.

But Malfoy would have more witnesses here, and he had always avoided committing crimes in the Ministry, as far as Harry could find, even if _all _the crimes Harry suspected were his really were. Harry would rely on the bastard's need to preserve his reputation untarnished rather than spells, he reckoned.

_His reputation…_

Harry clenched his fists and stared at the shut door of the safe, which blended with the wood at the bottom of the wall, for long moments in silence. He couldn't tell anyone what Malfoy had done last night, except for Ron and Hermione. What would happen if word of _that _got out? Some people thought Harry was an excellent Auror, but they would snicker behind their hands at the thought of someone escaping him when they had broken into his house like that.

No. Thorin had told him he had to investigate this case alone, and Harry had just come up with another reason to do so.

"Morning, mate."

Harry shook the thoughts of Malfoy off—they occupied his mind too much lately—and turned to smile at Ron. Ron yawned and nodded and shuffled over to his desk, spreading the _Daily Prophet _out on top of the piles of paperwork there. Harry inwardly shuddered. He would never be Thorin, with his passion for reports, but he had got used to a clean desk, and he didn't understand how Ron preferred to have his files spread out instead of neatly stored in a cabinet or something else.

"Oh, _this _is entertaining."

Harry leaned over Ron's shoulder to take a better look. Ron pointed at the lead story, which contained a winking photograph of Malfoy remarkably like the one on Harry's wall and the headline DRACO MALFOY: DANGEROUSLY DARING.

Harry rolled his eyes. "Oh, did he make a contribution to a charity that will scandalize pure-blood prats again?" The _Prophet _thought Malfoy was being "dangerously daring" to donate to orphans for Muggleborn children and efforts to find a cure for lycanthropy. Harry turned away to check the safe again and make sure that no one had any reason to suspect it was there.

Ron was skimming the article, and he yelped, spraying the cup of tea he'd also carried in all over the page. Harry whipped around, his wand coming up, and then managed to settle down a little and shake himself when he realized Ron was fine. It had only been the noise that had startled Harry in the first place.

"You were right about him, mate," Ron said, leaning back to give Harry a look of wonder. "At least, partially right. He's claiming that he's going to steal the Fountain of Magical Brethren from the Atrium."

Harry stared, and the first words that came into his mind were _I don't believe it._

Perhaps Ron saw an echo of that in his eyes, because he rolled his own and thrust the paper at Harry. "What, this is a confirmation of everything that you've been saying for _years_, and the first time you have a _chance _to believe it, you decide not to? Read the article."

Harry picked up the paper with a hand that trembled and denial thrumming through his body. But why should it be denial? Malfoy liked risks. It would be like him to claim that he was going to steal the Fountain just to put the Aurors on alert and then succeed at doing it anyway, and to increase the challenge, the game.

But Harry still didn't believe it. The Fountain didn't _fit _the huge theft that Malfoy had talked about planning, except that it was public and large. Yes, taking it would be difficult, but it wasn't particularly expensive, not since the war, when they had made the new figures out of pewter. And if Malfoy told the truth, then they would trace the theft straight to him. It might be hard for some of those who had spent the years convinced Malfoy was a gentleman philanthropist to believe he would do it, but if the Fountain vanished, then the Aurors would be honor-bound to at least investigate.

Malfoy, Harry knew, didn't want that. He wanted the mask of deniability. So it made sense that he would proclaim a theft of one kind and then steal something else.

"I wish I knew what the fuck he _wanted_," Harry told the paper.

"Oh, I think I know," Ron said, and batted the paper aside so he could reach the stack of files immediately beneath it.

Harry blinked and turned to his friend. It wouldn't be the first time that Ron had come up with an insight that Harry had missed. "What?"

Ron looked up at him and raised an eyebrow. "Well, to be notorious, of course. To have people pay attention to him. God knows that he spent enough time trying to get _your _attention. So it would make sense for him to say outrageous things that would make him famous for a little while. Maybe he heard the rumors you've spread about him and decided that he might as well claim the title of thief."

Harry gave the paper another long look. The Malfoy pictured there really did seem to look directly at him and wink, like the one that he would have to get someone professional to charm off his wall, even though Harry knew the _Prophet _hired photographers who would make sure that the pictures looked like that to everyone.

_He wants attention. But not just the public's attention._

_Mine._

Harry gritted his teeth and tossed the paper back in the middle of Ron's desk, ignoring his mild protest as it knocked one of his stacks over. Malfoy was probably expecting Harry to storm after him the moment he saw this article.

Well. Harry thought it was rather time that he _not _do what Malfoy wanted for once.

* * *

"You don't have the evidence necessary to arrest him yet."

_And that's what he says before he even asks why I've firecalled him, _Harry thought, and managed to keep from rolling his eyes only because he'd dealt with Thorin for so long. He knelt next to the hearth and arranged his face in a pleasant expression. It was important to stay there so that Thorin couldn't see the changed colors in his drawing room, which Harry still hadn't managed to remove. "I didn't firecall about that, sir."

"Oh?" Thorin's eyebrows contracted. He looked like he was pushing a painful thought up a steep hill. "What for, then? This is your only case now, Potter, and I expect you to pull it through to a successful conclusion."

Harry spread his hands slightly. "At the moment, sir, until Malfoy either moves or doesn't on the Fountain, I don't feel that there's anything I can do. If he commits himself, we'll have the evidence we need to arrest him. If he doesn't, then I'm sure he'll sit back and enjoy the public frenzy, which means he won't move until after it dies down. Either way, I don't want to waste Department time and resources. I respectfully request another case."

Thorin squinted at him, but Harry had this down to an art by now. He just had to keep a quiet and a patient face, and eventually Thorin would decide that the mask was truth. Especially when Harry was echoing the thoughts that Thorin had spent a lot of time trying to convince Aurors to believe over the years.

"Well," Thorin said, and smoothed his beard for a moment. "It _is _pleasant to see you growing up, Auror Potter. There were some who thought you would die during one of your risky operations before then."

Compared to what had happened last night, that wasn't insulting at all. Harry reminded himself that he would get more pleasure out of throwing Malfoy in a cell than beating Thorin's face to a pulp, and nodded seriously, leaning forwards as if to convey a secret. "Yes, sir," he whispered. "I sometimes thought that myself. But the Auror Department has taught me some valuable lessons over the years." He had debated saying that _Thorin _had taught him those lessons, but decided to back off at the last instant. That was a little too much flattery, and Thorin wouldn't believe it.

Thorin almost beamed at him, and said, "Very well, Auror Potter. You'll be back with Auror Weasley tomorrow. He could use some help on his latest case."

Harry released a breath that had more than one cause to come out as shaky as it did. "Thank you, sir. I'll see you tomorrow."

He closed the Floo connection and stood up to face the photograph of Malfoy tacked on the wall again. He knew it wasn't true, but he had the _perception _that the winking eye closed a little less confidently and quickly this time, and that was all to the good.

"Let's see what happens when I'm not chasing you," he whispered. "You want my attention? Then _work _for it."

* * *

Harry sighed and carefully began to cast the complex series of incantations that, in reverse, would remove the enchanted emerald collar from Ron's neck and allow him to breathe again. For the moment, Ron was under a charm that would transport air to his lungs through a modified Apparition, because the collar had completely closed off his throat.

Ron, draped over his desk where the collar had clamped itself to the wood, rolled his eyes at Harry and made grunting noises.

"I know," Harry said patiently, and then paused so he could make sure that he had the Latin in the next spell right. "But that's why _normal _people don't pick up cursed collars and hold them next to their neck while daring them to clamp on. A lesson learned, hmmm?" He managed to imitate Thorin's tone exactly, and Ron looked caught between laughing—when he could—and telling Harry exactly what he thought of him.

"Auror Potter! A message for you."

Harry just barely got the next spell off in time, and the collar finally flew home to the dark wooden base it had come with and Ron gasped in a grateful breath of air. Harry nodded and made sure that his face showed only pleasant attention as he turned towards Auror Flowing. "Thank you," he said. "Next time, please, don't interfere when you see an Auror engaged in a delicate magical operation. Auror Weasley might not have appreciated having his head cut off by the collar."

"What?" Ron shot his head up and glared at Harry. "You never said _that _was a possibility—"

"It might have been if I didn't put the incantations in the right order," Harry said, and shrugged with a grave face, because Flowing was right there, staring at them as if watching a Quidditch game, and he didn't want to laugh. "But since I was always going to put them in the right order—"

"Bar unexpected interruptions—" Ron said, and looked at Flowing.

She tried to babble an apology, but Harry overrode her. "Which I can deal with because I'm such a good Auror—there was still more of a chance that you'd choke to death than that you'd be decapitated."

Ron rolled his eyes. "Just as long as the chance was _small_, then."

"It was," Harry said, and then turned and held his hand out for the envelope he assumed Flowing had carried into the office.

She flushed all the harder, but said, "It's, er, an owl, sir. We can see your name on the letter, but it won't come near us. It's flown up into one corner of the main office and just sits there _staring _at us, sir."

A sharp tingle shot up Harry's spine, ending the last vestiges of his worry over Ron. He knew that his lips were stretched in a smile that must not be reassuring, but he managed to restrain it enough to nod to Flowing and say, "I'll come right away."

Flowing backed up as though to put her back against the doorway and nodded once, eyes still fastened on him. That made Harry sigh and say, "I think I know who it's from. You don't have to worry. It was just news that I was expecting, that's all, and I'm happy to hear it's arrived."

Flowing looked as though she wasn't convinced, but nodded and backed up some more. Harry turned to look at Ron and caught—although he hoped Flowing didn't—the widening of his eyes and the parting of his lips as he mouthed, _Malfoy?_

_I hope so, _Harry mouthed back, and turned to Flowing. "When you're ready."

The owl was a magnificent creature, with pale feathers that reminded Harry painfully of Hedwig for a moment. But the freezing look it turned on him from its immense amber eyes couldn't have been less like the looks Hedwig had always given him, and he took a step towards it with memories safely dead in the back of his mind.

The owl examined Harry's face, twisted its head to the side as though his identity could only be satisfactorily established by examining the back of his neck, and then launched itself into the air with silent flaps of its wings. Harry thought it was coming down to his arm and held it up. Instead, the owl landed in a rush on his shoulder, crowding so close that for a second Harry thought it would knock his head off his neck to find a good standing place. It made a complicated clicking noise with its beak and extended its leg to Harry, the envelope on it swaying back and forth from the push of its passage.

Harry narrowed his eyes as he took the envelope. It had the formal Malfoy crest on the outside. He could only hope that Flowing's report of the owl's temper was true and no one _had _got a good look at the letter before the owl flapped up on top of the tall cabinet where it had been sitting when Harry entered the room.

_What the fuck does he want? _

Then Harry rolled his eyes. Useless to ask the question when the answer lay so near. He ripped open the envelope and pulled out the slim letter inside. In his haste, he tore one corner, and felt the owl ruffle up on his shoulder at the offense.

"If you're waiting for me to respect your master, you're going to be waiting for a _long _time," Harry told it out of the corner of his mouth, and turned the letter right-side up; it had emerged from the envelope wrong way round.

_Harry._

_It is useless to think that you can remove yourself from the chase until _I _tell you that you can. And that will only be when I have caught you._

_Respond to me at once. If you do not, then you will not like the results._

_Draco._

Harry blinked, then shook his head. The threat was exactly the one he would have expected from someone like Malfoy: vague, haughty, and cheeky. Harry could have asked him not to use Harry's first name, but he knew exactly what the response would have been to a request like that.

"No answer," he told the owl, and put his hands in the right places on the letter to tear it up.

The owl's feathers bristled to the point that they poked Harry in the ear and eye and made him turn his head. There was a warning in the amber gaze that made Harry have to blink and remind himself that, no, birds couldn't threaten people, and this was just his imagination. Of course, if this was Malfoy's owl, it was absolutely no surprise that it had picked up some of Malfoy's attitude where Harry was concerned.

_I'm not his possession._

The anger burned hot in Harry, and he ripped the letter and tossed the halves of it into the air. Then he pointed his wand at them and cast a nonverbal _Incendio. _Flowing flinched as the flames consumed the halves of the paper.

The owl didn't.

It sat in place for long moments and continued to stare at Harry. Then it rose into the air and flew towards the far wall, exactly as if there was a window there.

Harry put his hand on his wand and opened his mouth to shout, the faint premonition of what would happen coming to him the way it sometimes did when he was fighting a skilled opponent and knew what spell they would cast next before they did it.

It was already too late. The owl vibrated, and magic broke from it, coruscating rays of black and blue that made it look, for a moment, like a black hole with the sun rising behind it. Harry flung his hand over his eyes as the owl flamed, its magic striking down again, and again, and again, and again. He heard each bolt as it hit, and smelled the scent in the air, sharper than lightning.

Silence reigned when it was done, although it was still a long moment before Harry could make his dazzled eyes work. Whatever the consequences, they were enough to cause a faint moan from Flowing.

He saw, at last, that every cabinet in Flowing's office was a bent, twisted, and smoking ruin. Flowing had moved to kneel beside the nearest one, her hands patting ineffectually at the heated air rising from it.

"Our files," she whispered. "Our files were in there, all the records of the criminals we arrested in the last year." She glanced up at Harry, her eyes so bright and mournful that Harry's stomach twisted like the cabinets had. "All our evidence."

_If you do not, then you will not like the results._

And it wasn't Harry who had suffered, but two low-ranking Aurors on whom Thorin's wrath would fall like Voldemort.

Harry felt his lips pull back from his teeth, and once again Flowing flinched. But Harry made sure to catch her eye and shake his head, gently.

"I'm going to get revenge for this," he said. "And I'll explain what happened to Thorin. He's more likely to listen to me."

_And if he doesn't put me back on the Malfoy case, I'll put myself back on it._

_You wanted my attention, Malfoy? You have it._

_But I doubt you'll like the results, either._


	6. Slicing Down

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Six—Slicing Down_

"You don't _know _that he intended to destroy the records. It may have been merely an unfortunate side-effect of his spell."

Harry stared at Thorin across his desk. Thorin looked back at him with a faint frown, as though he didn't understand why his comment had made Harry pause in his verbal report.

_The verbal report is probably not something he wants to be doing, anyway, _Harry thought, his mind still working through the implications of the comment. _If something's not written down, then he doesn't think it's real._

Which was precisely why it was so clever of Malfoy to strike at the records. He knew that Thorin would be reluctant to believe the most obvious case of wrongdoing without the reports and files and memorandums that made it all seem a solid world to him.

"I do think he intended to destroy it, sir," Harry said, when he had recovered his tongue and his mental balance. "Nothing else in the room was harmed, even Auror Flowing, who was closer to the blast than I was. Only the cabinets. A random curse, especially one triggered to start out of Malfoy's sight, would have blasted the desks and the people in the room as well. There was no reason for it not to."

Thorin spent a moment arranging the papers in front of him. Harry looked down at them, but he had never developed the skill that Ron and some of the other Aurors had, to read the reports upside-down. He did see what looked like a list of names, but Thorin saw him looking and whisked that under another sheet of parchment at once, before Harry could see whether his name was on there.

"We don't have the evidence," Thorin said. "Only the rather biased accounts of the two people in the office, and I have to say, Auror Potter, that Auror Flowing comes across as rather hysterical to me."

"She thinks she nearly died, sir, and this is the first time she's faced that," Harry said flatly. "She didn't believe in the targeted effect of the spell. And I don't know why you wouldn't believe me, since I _am _the one you assigned to this case."

Thorin nodded and rubbed the scar on his ring finger with the one right next to it. "Yes, yes, but your bias against Malfoy is well-known. Go to the papers and repeat what you just told me, and no one is going to believe you. We need still more convincing evidence, Potter, evidence that no one on the Wizengamot is going to sneer at."

Harry leaned forwards, bracing his palms on the desk. He was controlling himself, carefully, because he thought he would only ever get one chance to stun Thorin with his anger and override his stupid decisions that way, and now wasn't the time.

"If you think that they'll distrust me because of my bias, sir, then why put me on the case?"

"I've already told you why." Thorin looked at him with hooded eyes. "If you're right, and that was Malfoy's intention, to destroy the records, then we need new ones. Go and make them, Auror Potter. Get it in _writing_."

Harry, in his imagination, slammed his palms down on Thorin's desk, made the whole stack of paperwork leap in the air and cover him like an avalanche, and stormed out. And the Department of Magical Law Enforcement applauded him, and the Wizengamot agreed that he'd been provoked beyond endurance, and he had an Order of Merlin the next week for dealing with a Head Auror that everyone hated.

But…

But he couldn't do that.

Harry couldn't arrest Malfoy unless he played by the rules, especially with Thorin so rules-bound, and he wanted to arrest Malfoy. He ground his teeth until they hurt and then bowed his head. "As you say, sir."

"No need to look so hangdog, Potter," said Thorin, in what he probably thought was a jolly tone. "You can move as soon as you have some evidence to go on, some _real _evidence. Not simply false confessions and letters that could be jokes and spells that could have been harmless pranks."

Harry held back the urge to respond that Thorin would be cowering under his desk if that attack had happened in _his _office, and that Auror Flowing was doing well to be able to talk rationally about it after a cup of tea. Thorin just wouldn't believe without proof. Harry had to have the proof. He was only glad that he had already locked Linton's letters in that safe in his office, so that there was no way Malfoy could get at them with the same kind of spell.

_Unless there's someone in here spying for him and they can tell him exactly where that little alcove is…_

Harry shook his head sharply, and dismissed the paranoid fantasies. He nodded to Thorin instead and said, "I'll get that, sir." And he left the office with his back straight and the yells locked firmly in the bottom of his throat.

He wondered for a moment what he should do next. Fine, Malfoy had his attention again, and arresting him now simply wasn't an option. Going back to Malfoy Manor probably wouldn't do much good, either, and Harry had already read through Flowing and Wing's notes and the Linton letters so often that he probably knew them by heart.

_Make him find me._

* * *

"I knew I would find you here."

Harry took another slow sip of his Firewhisky and glanced up to find Malfoy standing there, next to his table in the Leaky Cauldron, staring at him. He shrugged. "You found me here once before. It was a logical deduction."

He didn't think there was anything really different in his manner, but Malfoy's smile sharpened, and he slid into the seat where he'd sat last week without taking his eyes from Harry. "You're angry with me," he whispered. "Why?"

Harry exhaled slowly and looked into his mug. He had intended to play it cool when Malfoy had shown up; he had thought that would be easy. Why not? He knew the truth if no one else did, and he thought he was getting used to Malfoy's mixture of teasing, seriousness, and outright idiocy.

"You nearly killed someone yesterday," Harry said. "That's why."

Malfoy leaned back in his seat and crossed his legs. This morning he wore a simple white shirt and dark blue trousers, without the dress robes that Harry was used to seeing him in. Then again, he might not have gone to the Ministry today, and that was where he wore the dress robes, to impress the people who thought him a paragon of respectability.

"Someone?" Malfoy asked. "And this mysterious person doesn't have a name and an identity you can give me?" He leaned in and lowered his voice, probably meaning the words to go home like an arrow to the heart. "Should I be jealous, Harry?"

_And if I get desperate enough, that would be another way to draw him close. _Harry told himself to remember that, and shook his head. "You should know the name, considering which office you sent the owl to."

Malfoy laughed. He was still leaning in, and Harry distrusted that, the tense, coiled stillness, as though he was waiting for something to happen. Usually, he moved around more than that.

_And I hate that I know that. On the other hand, it should be useful if I ever manage to fight him in close quarters._

"I think I might know it, then," Malfoy said, and cocked his head to the side in what was probably meant as a whimsical gesture. "But, Harry, you mean to say that you _resent _me for that? Such a natural action to take, destroying the records that might be there! I notice that your Head Auror hasn't given you the chance to take advantage of that natural action, though."

Harry turned back to his Firewhisky and once again sipped, letting the rich taste run down his throat, the slight burn gather at the back of it, and the thickness settle on his tongue. It was the only way that he might get away with not strangling Malfoy.

"Tell me one thing," Malfoy said. "One thing, and I'll leave you alone for today."

Harry wasn't sure that was what he wanted, in lieu of a clue to the great theft that Malfoy was planning. But not acting eager to get rid of him could tell Malfoy Harry was hunting him through trying to reel him in. He eyed him. "Oh? I can't tell you if it concerns someone else's secrets."

"What would I want with someone else's secrets?" Malfoy waved a lazy hand, his eyes locked on Harry's face. "No, I'm far more interested in something else. Something that I _know _you can give me."

In the end, Harry thought, there was nothing for it but to follow Malfoy's lead and see what happened. So he nodded, while tightening his hand on the wand beneath the table.

"Do you enjoy your life?"

Harry blinked. That had been the opposite of what he had expected Malfoy to ask, which would have something to do with Ron, or Hermione, or Hogwarts, or—something they had _shared. _Something that Harry could see Malfoy having interest in, if only to taunt him about it.

But when he looked into Malfoy's eyes, there were none of the signs he would have decided immediately were simply covers for a lie. Instead, Malfoy stared at him, and his eyes _burned_. The shine seemed reflected in the expression on his face, which was far too bright to be incidental.

_Or so you think. Remember how good an actor is, and what kind of ways he can come up with to fool people. Remember all the ones who think that he's just a harmless idiot who wants to donate a lot of money to make up for his family's actions in the war._

And Harry was trying to remember that, but just like when he had been looking at Linton's letters, it was hard to distrust Malfoy completely and trust him enough to evaluate his behavior at the same time. At the moment, Harry decided, he would accept that Malfoy was interested in him, if only to expose him as a fraud instead of the best Auror ever, and he would try to use that interest as a lever.

"Yes," he said. "Of course. It's the only life I have, and more than I thought I would have, after the war. Of course it's enjoyable."

"I'm not talking about it in comparison to the life that you might have had," Malfoy said, his voice quiet, his eyes as intense as they had been all along. "Or the non-life, if the Dark Lord had killed you during the war. I want to know if you _enjoy _it. If you like following the rules, and spending all your time serving people who aren't as smart as you are, and chasing criminals that half the time get off again on some technicality because they have enough money to hire the best advocates. I'm asking you if you like that."

"I enjoy being an Auror," Harry said. "And all those are necessary parts of being an Auror." His hand hurt with the grip he had on his wand. He flattened out his palm on his knee, and tried to convince himself that wasn't dangerous.

Malfoy leaned nearer still. Harry felt himself flush and the hair on the back of his neck prickle. He had always hated being stared at like this, by reporters or Hermione or anyone else. It made him want to hide.

"It's _not _a necessary part of being an Auror," Malfoy whispered. "Sometimes they have superiors who trust them, and they can make sure their arrests stick. Sometimes they have superiors who are more like partners, and can work with them."

"Sometimes," Harry said. "But I don't."

"And you don't want to rebel?" Malfoy whispered, his voice falling until Harry had to lean in himself to hear it. "You don't want to scream at the rules for once and do what you want, what you know is _right_?" He baited the last word with honey and lies.

Harry took a deep breath, and shook his head. Malfoy couldn't know about the dreams that sometimes filled his head, because they were just that, dreams, and Harry hadn't shared them with anyone, so Malfoy couldn't know about them, and couldn't taunt Harry with them. "No, I really don't," he said, and gave Malfoy a smile as vicious as he could. Maybe he could irritate the bastard into backing off.

_Do you want to, when you have to catch him?_

_But him just chatting like this to me doesn't matter. What matters is getting him to confess the details of that theft he's planning._

"What is right can't be achieved by…doing just what I want," Harry said, seeking words that would turn the conversation back in the direction of what he was more interested in. "And that means that I can't break the rules and demand people follow me, or whatever you're advocating. Enough people already think I'll do that because I'm the Boy-Who-Lived, that I'll depend on my prestige to get me out of trouble or persuade people to do something stupid. I have to show that I'm not like that in order for them to take me seriously."

Malfoy went still, his eyes fixed on Harry. Harry maintained the gaze, and said nothing. He knew that _something _he said had got through to Malfoy, although he had no idea what it was, and he was afraid of spoiling it if he talked.

"I can't believe I never saw that before," Malfoy whispered. "I wondered why you were content to lead such a cramped life, where your passion had gone, but that's it, isn't it? You're _actually afraid_ that they'll throw you out of the Ministry if they once get an idea that you're reaching above your station. And you want to keep your job so desperately—Merlin only knows why—that you'll force yourself to be something you're not."

"I know what I am," Harry said, and glanced up and down the pub. No one was paying much attention to them; most people didn't, now that they had become used to Harry drinking in the Leaky Cauldron so many afternoons a week. "A good Auror, and someone who doesn't need to listen to your _bollocks_." He cast his Galleons roughly down, used a simple spell to send them over to Tom in a ringing line of gold, and turned to face the door of the pub.

Malfoy's hand was on his wrist.

Harry turned around, snarling in anger, and stopped the moment he saw Malfoy's face. It had a faint, inviting half-smile on it, but it wasn't smug in the way that he hated. Malfoy reached out with his free hand and held it there, palm flat and open, as if offering Harry something. Harry stared at it, but no opal or other stolen treasure appeared.

It was—attractive.

Harry hated the thought, but being honest with himself might have some benefits where Malfoy was concerned, so he stood still, with his arms folded, and glared back instead of retreating the way he wanted to. Malfoy gave him a softer smile, and his hand on Harry's arm pulled, urged, him closer. Harry went, although he half-wanted to break free. Doing what Malfoy desired couldn't be a good idea.

"I could give you what you wanted," Malfoy said to him, voice deep and slow, lips a few inches from Harry's. "The ability to break the rules and to do the things that you thought were right. The ability to live a life that you actually enjoy, instead of one that you think makes other people happy."

"By teaching me Dark Arts?" Harry sneered and stepped back, but Malfoy's hold didn't let him retreat far, and he ended up stopping because he didn't want to look ridiculous yanking against Malfoy's grip. "No fucking _thanks_. I don't want to become the kind of criminal that you train, just another of your conquests—"

"You're the conquest I would treasure forever."

Malfoy leaned in and kissed Harry again, the way he had outside the gates of Malfoy Manor, but this time it was much slower, more languid, and gently insistent than Harry remembered the touch of his mouth being before. As Harry stood there, because he didn't know what the fuck was going on or what the fuck he should do next, Malfoy's hand found its way into the hair on the back of Harry's neck and toyed, fingers sliding up and down, pausing, then pressing into the skin in a way that Harry had never felt before but apparently _really _liked.

Harry gasped, and then tore his mouth free and wiped it. Malfoy, watching him, only smiled, warm and sphinx-like, and stood up.

"Not make you a criminal," he said. "I think you know what I want. You just won't admit it to yourself."

And he turned and sauntered out of the pub, ignoring the stares that by now were coming from every corner.

Harry shut his eyes, his face so bright red that he wanted to cast a glamour. But everyone had already seen, and there was no point in hiding after the fact. He cast a spell to remove the swollen look from his lips, though, because he worried about what Ron might say if he went back to the Ministry looking like that.

_He might be happy for you. You know that he sometimes feels that you don't get laid enough._

Harry snarled and stalked out of the pub. It was ridiculous, these thoughts. Part of him had always been traitorous, getting angry too easily and resenting people in the Ministry—like Thorin—for stupid little slights that he knew he shouldn't even pay any attention to. Why in the _world _couldn't he grow up all the way? Normal people wouldn't respond to Malfoy. Normal people wouldn't hate and resent some aspects of their jobs instead of just learning to live with them.

Harry paused, then, and one of his thoughts from earlier that was actually useful came back to him.

Malfoy _wanted _the part of him that was like that, didn't he? Or at least he wanted Harry to believe he did. That meant he would probably think it worthwhile to get closer if Harry displayed more of that part, whatever his ultimate goal was.

Harry showed his teeth. There was no one around to see, but that didn't matter. What mattered most was what he thought of himself, and he would know that he had done his best whatever happened.

He had thought of another way that he might take down Malfoy.


	7. Modified Wiles

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_Chapter Seven—Modified Wiles_

Harry stepped back and frowned down at the book in his arms. He was _fairly _sure that the charm he had found was the key to removing the photograph of Malfoy from his wall, but the last three spells he had tried had only made the photograph wink faster, or cling more firmly to the place Malfoy had stuck it. He wondered if he should cast this one, when the consequences might be worse.

Then he shook his head. The fact was that he was sick of the picture winking at him night and day, and he couldn't trust anyone else with this for fear that they would collapse and die of the giggles. He raised his wand.

"_Evanesco Maximus!"_

The power of the spell seemed to shudder through his home. Harry watched the photograph stop winking and open its eyes wide as the magic struck it. Harry snickered in spite of himself. He knew this picture wasn't the real Malfoy and that he wouldn't affect the real one by affecting _it_, but it was bloody satisfying to see anyway.

Then the charm dissipated, as though someone had cast a _Finite _on it, and the Malfoy in the photograph stopped holding onto the sides of the frame and relaxed against the background, which showed a tree in winter. It shook its head chidingly at Harry, and resumed its winking.

Harry ground his teeth. At least the charm had had a more positive, or less destructive, effect on the rest of his property. He would keep trying and see what he could discover in the same line.

His Floo flared, and Harry hastily moved forwards so that he obscured the sight of both the book and the adjustments Malfoy had made, as usual. "Open," he said, when he had made sure that it _was _the Floo and not someone playing a prank on him or the fire flaring up on its own.

Thorin's face appeared in the fire, and Harry stifled a groan even as he knelt down to see him better. What had he done _now? _He hadn't even filed his preliminary report yet.

But maybe that was a good thing, if Thorin was about to demand the bloody thing in triplicate. Harry swallowed, and did his best to smile at Thorin instead of cursing the way he wanted to. "Sir? What is it? Has there been a new development on the Malfoy case?"

"I should say so," Thorin said in a low voice that boded nothing good, usually used when someone had lost the paper clips. "Someone told me that you were _kissing _Malfoy in public, Auror Potter. Is that the sort of tactic that you usually employ to discover what your suspects are doing, Auror Potter?"

His name repeated twice in close succession wasn't a good sign, either. Harry swallowed all the useless explanations he could give and went for the one that _might_ be of some use. "Malfoy is obsessed with me, sir. I discovered that today."

_And you would have known about it before, if you'd paid attention, _Ron's scolding voice said in the back of his head.

Harry did his best to disregard that. It didn't _matter_. "And I thought that I might be able to get close to him and get him to confess his plans about the theft he's announced if I played on that obsession. Thus I allowed him to kiss me. That's all."

Thorin blinked. Harry wondered whether he had expected spluttering anger and denial instead of a plan.

"I see," he said at last. "Are you sure that you _allowed _him to kiss you, Auror Potter?"

Harry smiled thinly as he met Thorin's eyes. He recognized this ploy—apparently trying to give him an out by blaming Malfoy for everything, only to pounce on him from a different direction. "I'm sure, sir," he said. "I'm a very powerful Auror, remember? I could have broken free from him easily, had I wanted."

Thorin again paused and blinked. Harry wasn't playing by the script.

_And why is there a script? _Harry thought, kneeling there, his mind buzzing as he stared at Thorin. He had always known the Head Auror disliked him, but then, he disliked _most _of the Aurors that he worked with who didn't think paperwork was the most important thing since Merlin. It seemed odd that he would single out Harry in particular, when Harry had always tried to make sure that he obeyed the rules or had some brilliant reason for not doing so.

_Who changed his mind? Is he in Malfoy's pay after all? Is that why he assigned me to the case?_

But that just made Harry reject the idea. Malfoy would be playing against _himself _if that was the case. So easily control the Head Auror, and he would have an easier time plucking Harry from the vine, if that was what he really wanted.

_And apparently it is, although really…_

Harry was the opposite of Malfoy in every way, and the things that Malfoy had detested him for in school, like his stubborn loyalty to his friends and his notion of doing right, had only grown stronger since he became an Auror. It seemed odd for Malfoy to desire him when Harry was a perfect caricature of everything he should despise.

And then Harry dismissed that thought, too. Malfoy wasn't here right now to question, or watch the way his face flushed. He had to deal with Thorin, the enemy in front of him.

"Yes, that's true," Thorin said at last, seeming to have decided that it was the safest response. "Although I must say that I'm not impressed by your progress so far on the case."

"It's only been a few days, sir," Harry said soothingly, while all the time he watched Thorin's green face for the subtlest of clues that might indicate he _was _in Malfoy's pay. "Let me work a little longer, and I'll have something for you."

"I certainly _hope _so," Thorin said, and sniffed as he pulled his head back. "In the meantime, do try to counter the rumors that will certainly be flying about your sexual orientation and your ability to escape Malfoy's wiles, will you, Potter?"

"I'll try, sir," Harry said, and maintained the same bright smile until Thorin had vanished. Then he leaned back and shut his eyes, carefully revising the conversation until he had to sigh and shake his head.

No, there was no sign that Thorin was in Malfoy's pay. It might simply be that he disliked Harry, as Harry knew he always had, and saw less reason to hide it now that Harry was working alone and without an audience in his partner.

For a moment, Harry wished savagely that he _was _still working with Ron. Ron would tell him that he was being an idiot when he had certain thoughts about Malfoy. Ron would rein him in when Harry ranted about Thorin even as he provided a listening ear. Ron would suggest they go out and eat lunch in a place where Malfoy might be unlikely to find them.

But Ron was absent on his own case right now, and Harry didn't really want to drag him back into this one and give him a double load of work that way. Harry had said again and again that Malfoy was really a thief, that he was the only one who knew it and the only one who could bring him to justice, hadn't he? Then it was time that he proved that.

And it was time that he accepted Malfoy might have a _genuine _sexual interest in him and used that as a weapon.

Harry stood up, swallowing, and went in search of a letter that had arrived the other day and which he had cast into a corner simply because there was no time to incinerate it properly before he had to leave on his next case.

Now was the time to accept the invitation it offered, as horrific as that prospect was.

* * *

"Such a pleasure to see you, Mr. Potter, please come back _any _time…"

Harry inwardly shuddered as he nodded to Madam Bounteous—as she called herself—and fled into the street. The aura of incense and silk from the shop followed him a short distance before it was cut off as the witch sighed and closed the door. Harry was fairly sure that she'd taken the chance to ogle his arse first, though.

_What a terrible experience, _Harry thought, grimacing, and staring down at the bags that were slung over one arm.

It had been. To stand for hours on a literal pedestal while people hovered around him who were putting him on a metaphorical one, staring at him with infatuated eyes, and sighing over him, and leaping to measure him again and again when he shifted his stance, and telling him that _of course _he needed more than one set of dress robes, and trying to tempt him with Muggle clothes when he knew they were just hoping he would undress…

_Yeah, it was horrible. But it's over now. _

Harry turned in relief down the street that led to the nearest Apparition point, and then became aware that someone was walking beside him. Harry turned his head and opened his mouth, assuming that Madam Bounteous had sent one of her assistants after him in order to make him another of her "incredible offers."

He nearly swallowed his tongue when Malfoy reached out and ran a finger down the sleeve of the robe that was hanging out of the nearest bag, his eyebrows raised and his forehead furrowed.

"Did someone really tell you that grey would become you?" Malfoy murmured, and then looked him up and down. "Well, perhaps if I saw it against your skin, then I would understand the appeal of that type of coloration. You look oddly nice, Harry."

Harry caught his breath and said, "Well, I was having a morning without much stress until you appeared."

"We can't have _that_," Malfoy murmured, lowering his head. Harry thought it was a given that he was going to brush his lips along Harry's temple and shied, ducking his head and wincing away. Malfoy paused, and then laughed softly, his breath rattling in his throat. "And here I thought that those clothes might be for me, Potter," he whispered.

_Damn it, they were supposed to be. _Harry never would have made a trip to such a horrible place as Madam Bounteous's Robes for the Discerning Wizard if he wasn't trying to make himself more attractive to Malfoy.

But he just wasn't good at this. He got a lot more practice putting off people who wanted to flirt with him than flirting himself.

He glanced up at Malfoy, and found the git regarding him with a steady, interested gaze. He seemed a lot less flighty than he had during the time that he'd broken into Harry's home or offered him the stolen opal, and that settled Harry's fluttering gut a little. Just maybe, he would get through this particular conversation without throwing up on Malfoy's shoes.

"They sort of are," he said slowly, feeling his way through the words. Not that that by itself should be enough to alert Draco, he thought. Draco—think of him that way, and this became easier—would expect him to be all shy and hesitant when it came to asserting an attraction. "I thought about what you did when you—changed my house the other day. And there's no reason to wear just Auror robes all the time, is there? I'm not on duty all the time."

Malfoy said nothing. Harry glanced up at him, wondering if he'd overdone it.

Malfoy was smiling, a slow and delighted expression that Harry wanted to pretend he'd seen on the front page of too many newspapers to find impressive, but the truth was that this was different, and he knew it. _This _smile could persuade people that Malfoy hadn't given money to to find him charming.

It made his stomach turn over—and not in the way that Harry would have _preferred _that it turn over.

_Oh, fuck, no, _he thought, and stifled the immediate impulse of panic that wanted him to spring away from Malfoy's side. That wasn't going to happen. Nothing was going to happen that he didn't want to, because this was his job, and he was going to make sure that he was in control of his reactions to Malfoy, not the other way around.

"That's what I wanted to see," Malfoy said, and his voice was so soft and caressing that Harry wanted to shake himself. It wrapped around him like the silk robes that Madam Bounteous had insisted in a loud voice he _had _to try on, and which Harry had taken off as quickly as he could because they made his skin feel odd. "Some consideration for yourself, beyond the demands of the job. A focus on your personal life." His hand brushed Harry's shoulder, so light that Harry doubted he would have noticed it if he hadn't seen the gesture from the corner of his eye.

Harry shook his head. "So that makes it easier for you to move in on me, right," he muttered.

"I want you," Malfoy said, against his ear, and then turned and pulled him towards the wall of the nearest shop. Harry, aware of the eyes that could be on them, dug his feet into place and resisted, and Malfoy cocked his head at him. "Don't you want to hear about the theft I'm planning?" he added, in a wheedling tone.

Harry gritted his teeth. "You know everything, and you're laughing at me," he snapped.

Malfoy paused, his smile disappearing. "You should explain what you mean by that," he said evenly. "Why would I laugh at someone I want? That would make me ridiculous by association."

Harry sighed in irritation and resisted the temptation to bury his head in his hands and tug on his hair. "You're ridiculous because you—because you want me in the first place," he said, knowing it was a weak retort, but the best he could come up with at the moment. "But you know that I don't want you in return, and that I'm chasing you because I'm an Auror and you're a criminal, and you knew the real reason I bought these robes as soon as you saw them. Why do we have to keep on _pretending?_ Why not just say what we really mean?"

Malfoy paused again. His hands were on Harry's shoulders still, the way they had been when he first began to tug him towards the wall. His eyes were on Harry's, though, and he searched them with obvious rapt interest. "You don't like games much, do you, Harry?" he asked.

"You haven't earned the right to call me that," Harry snapped, reaching up to slap Malfoy's hands off him. "And no, I don't. Not when the people I'm playing with don't even think to tell me the rules."

Malfoy smiled, and while this wasn't as charming as his first one, it had a curling edge to it that made something in Harry's stomach curl in response. Harry steeled himself and gritted his teeth. He refused, he _refused, _to feel what Malfoy wanted him to feel, even more than he refused to feel that one particular reaction in regards to Malfoy.

"I'll tell you the rules," Malfoy whispered. "I'll even tell you the target of my theft, for the price of one kiss."

"I'm already in trouble with my boss because the first kiss happened," Harry said evenly.

Malfoy smiled winsomely at him. "What? The one near the walls of my Manor? I can assure you that Head Auror Thorin sees nothing of what goes on there."

Harry paused, trying to listen for nuances in the words that would tell him whether Malfoy really _was _paying Thorin. In the end, though, he decided there was nothing he could sense, and shook his head in frustration. "No. I meant the one in the Leaky Cauldron."

"That was our second kiss," Malfoy said. "And this one is our third." He reached out and put his hand on Harry's jaw, cupping it, pulling him closer, but carefully watching his eyes, as if ready to pull back if he didn't like it.

Harry didn't trust that implicit promise for a moment, but he hesitated instead of pulling away, and said, "You really _will _tell me the target of your theft if I let you kiss me?"

"Yes," Malfoy said, and smiled, and ran a thumb down the side of Harry's jaw. Harry found himself relaxing and opening his mouth without ever planning to. Malfoy sighed and dipped his head, tongue flicking out so that he could touch Harry's lips with it. "Yes," he repeated, in a distant, soft voice. "Let me in."

Harry cast a Disillusionment Charm on them, and did.

Malfoy kissed this time as though he was trying to use his mouth to convince Harry of something, his eyes closed and his fingers sliding up and down, making Harry start as sparks of sensation leaped to life in his throat and shoulders. But he kept his own eyes open against the temptation to close them, and reminded himself that this could be the break in the case he needed. Malfoy didn't seem able to help himself even though he knew exactly what was going on, probably because he thought he could escape any time he wanted. Harry would use this against him.

Even if it _was _hard not to close his eyes and simply succumb to the sensations.

Malfoy finally pulled back and opened his eyes with a languid sigh, his eyelashes sliding up and across his skin until Harry realized he was staring and turned his head away.

"All right," Malfoy whispered. "You. I'm going to steal you, and take you away from those stuffy regulations that make your life impossible and stress you out far more than you deserve to be stressed for refusing me."

Harry laughed before he could stop himself. "I knew that already," he said. "I mean, you said that was your excuse. But what's the real target?"

Malfoy's charming smile flashed again. "Why, Harry," he answered, "don't you believe me?"

And his cloak swirled around him as he turned on the spot and Apparated.

Harry spent some time standing there and feeling like a fool. Yes, Malfoy _had _insisted that was the truth before, hadn't he? And Harry had fallen for his little offer to simply repeat what he had stated before.

Harry lowered his head so that his eyes fell on the robes in the bags he had bought, and he felt his lips part in a snarl that made him tremble. He had bought these robes, and he was going to _use _them, and in a way that would _force _Malfoy to tell him the rest of the truth. Harry was a small prize; there was something else in the Ministry he wanted to steal.

_I'll seduce him so well that he'll gasp out the idea before he realizes._


	8. To Die For

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Eight—To Die For_

"Your hair would have been so much better all along if you had just let me advise you, dear."

Harry gave the enchanted mirror what it was perfectly free to think of as a smile, and stepped back, turning his head to the side. "You're sure that he'll like this?" he asked. His head looked—different—without the hair sticking up all over the place. It still wasn't completely flat, and it would never flow down to his shoulders in manly waves or anything, but it wasn't sticking out like a hedgehog's morning shag-quills, either.

"He'll _adore _it," said the mirror, and Harry thought it would have bounced in its gilded setting if it could have. "But you never did tell me the name of your mysterious boyfriend, dear."

Harry snorted. Hermione had bought him the enchanted mirror years ago as a birthday gift, during the period when she was trying to be more "wizarding" in every possible way, but this was the first time Harry had found a use for it, and it really wasn't that subtle. "I don't see that his name matters," he said, and picked up the sleeveless robe lying on the bed. He considered it with his head on one side for a moment, shaking his head. It was white, a glittering white that looked as if it came from the inside of an iceberg. Harry didn't think he'd ever worn something that color, but it had been the one robe that the various assistants at Robes for the Discerning Wizard agreed on.

_Which doesn't mean anything. It could just mean that they all have the same bad taste and you'll look stupid in it._

Harry stopped himself from glancing over his shoulder. There was no sign that Malfoy meant to break into his home this evening, and that meant he was alone, and no one else would see him if he _did _look stupid. He shrugged off his plain shirt and trousers, ignoring the way that the mirror whistled at him, and pulled the robe on. At least the material was thick and warm, brushing gently against his skin and then dropping back to hang around him in a way that, the assistant had said, would flow and outline his movements gracefully.

There were approximately two hundred small gold buttons for him to do up. Harry struggled with the robe in silence at first, then swore at it when it proved uncooperative, and as if the swearing had impressed it, the buttons became easier to manage. Harry looked up at last and studied himself in the mirror, pushing back his hair. He ignored the mirror's protests about how he was messing it up. Now that he knew the spells the mirror had mentioned to make his hair look like this, he could do the same thing himself any time.

He certainly looked _odd _in the robes, Harry decided after a moment. The assistants had said something about how he had "olive" skin, but to Harry, it just looked sallow and queer next to the white fabric. It didn't make him look washed-out the way that dress robes sometimes did, but he wasn't sure that he liked it. He grimaced and reached for the top button of all that massive array of them.

"Oh, don't!" the mirror whinged, hard enough to make Harry stop struggling and blink at it. "You look _stunning, _darling, and when's the next time that I'm going to get to see you looking like this?"

Harry blinked again and looked back at himself in the mirror, trying to find out what had attracted the mirror's notice. Nothing, as far as he could see. He was just—he was just himself, and the white color looked weirder by the minute.

"They were right, whoever said that the robes make the man," the mirror said, and sighed. "I wish there was some way that whoever said it could see you now."

Harry shot the mirror a skeptical glance. The only reason he hadn't smashed it or got rid of it _was _the fact that it was a gift from Hermione. None of that meant it knew what it was talking about, though.

"So handsome," the mirror said, and gave a little wavery sigh at the end of the words as if it would explode into shards and litter itself all over the floor. "So dashing!" And then it sank into muttering that made Harry shake his head and turn towards the other robes that he had taken out of the bags.

The mirror excoriated the grey one, the way that Malfoy had—and Harry told himself not to think about Malfoy's hands on his arms and his lips close to Harry's if he didn't want to explode into a permanent blush—but liked the deep blues and reds, the deep greens and the light shining blue that one of the girls had fainted when she saw him in. Harry studied that last one by the light of a few candles and a _Lumos _Charm and decided it would do. There were silver accents along the sleeves and hem that he thought about stripping off, but the mirror urged him to keep them, and it would do no harm to go along with its advice this once. Or this twice, if he counted his hair.

Then he stepped away, took a deep breath, and turned towards the door that led out of his house. Time to let other people see him, beyond the mirror and the winking photograph of Malfoy on the wall.

Harry couldn't tell for sure, but he thought the pace of the picture's winking faltered a bit when he walked through the drawing room. He could only hope that he would make as much of an impression on the original.

* * *

"Mr. Potter, we are so glad to welcome you. What would you like to begin with?"

Harry smiled and murmured and disclaimed, and especially refused the offer of a private room. The House of Athena was the newest and most exclusive restaurant off Diagon Alley, and most of the people who came to dine in it seemed to want tables where the noise and chatter of the other patrons didn't penetrate. But Harry had a purpose for eating in the grand front room, which was made up to look like a Greek temple with mirrors between the pillars.

And the manager seemed perfectly happy to have him eat there, too, really, given that it would probably bring in other business. He whisked cloths and dishes and glasses back and forth, and soon Harry was eating something that he knew had started as a bird back along the line but, somewhere between the sauces that smothered it and its fancy French name, had transformed so much he couldn't tell whether it was chicken or duck.

He let the manager fill his glass several times, with drinks whose names he didn't try to keep track of, either. He knew a convenient charm that made the liquid inside vanish at a tap of his wand underneath the table. Let those who watched think he was getting exceedingly drunk, or at least could be.

That was part of the plan, too.

Harry finally settled back when he had finished his meal and scowled at the door. The manager was instantly beside him, bending down so that Harry _had _to look into the anxious black eyes above the long white beard. "Is something wrong, Mr. Potter? Only you look as if there were, and you would _break my heart_ unless you can tell me that nothing is the matter."

Harry sighed and shook his head, but the manager pressed confidentially forwards, and finally Harry muttered, "All right. I was supposed to meet someone here. I don't _know _why they didn't show up, it's at least two hours since the time we agreed on."

The manager all but drooled over the prospect of knowing who Harry Potter was dating before anyone else, and Harry, leaning back in his chair, gave him a thin smile. _Yes, someone like him _would _see the gossip aspect of it._

"May I know the name?" the manager asked, all precious assurance and humble respect, at least on the surface. But Harry was pretty experienced at seeing the gleam of avarice beneath the surface, and he saw it then. He smiled in spite of himself. Of course, the man interpreted that as a compliment to him, and preened a little, all the time watching Harry eagerly from the corner of one eye.

"Well, I don't know that he would want me to tell it," Harry said, with an anxious glance at the doorway of the restaurant, which was up a set of long, sleek steps, as though the people who approached were climbing a hill. "We've only been dating for a few days."

"But he might have missed you in the crowd," the manager suggested smoothly.

Harry gave the man a long look that he at least had the grace to flush over. Harry was sitting in the center of the huge room, on a table that was raised above the others on a small dais. He had let the manager put him there because to be seen suited his plans, but of course, it would have made him instantly obvious to his imaginary date.

"Yes, well, my sympathies," the manager said at last, and cleared his throat. "I hope this won't discourage you from making use of the House of Athena in the future?"

Harry smiled, and watched as the man preened again. "Of course not. Although I object to the verb. One can never simply 'make use of' a restaurant as fine and expensive as this."

He sent the manager away deliriously happy, and then returned, humming, to the last of his drink. He finally left without looking behind him, his head up and his hands dangling at his sides as if he hadn't a care in the world.

_Now. To see what Malfoy makes of this._

* * *

What he made of it was a Howler that came and found Harry the next morning when he'd gone into the Ministry to make sure that Linton's letters were still safe in their hiding place.

This time, the owl that brought it was indisputably real; no magical owl could have crouched in the middle of Harry's desk as it held out the red envelope and deposited a fall of messy shit right on his papers. Harry reached out a hand for the letter that he had to pull back for a moment, since it trembled with excitement. Then he shut and locked the hall door, and put up a few Silencing Charms, right before the Howler finally burst out and started to scream.

"_Harry Potter._" Malfoy's voice, even when he was shouting, was lower than Mrs. Weasley's or Hermione's; they were the people Harry had got Howlers from most often in the past. Harry took his seat and grinned at the Howler, while the owl watched him with its head cocked as if trying to decide whether he was stupid. "_I know that you can't have started dating someone else in the two days since I last saw you. And I know that you wouldn't have kissed me if you were already dating someone. You're faithful, whatever else you are._"

"How do you know that?" Harry asked the Howler, although of course it couldn't hear him and Malfoy had merely paused for breath. "That could be the ideal Gryffindor you made up in your head, you know, not the person I really am." He shook his head as he thought about it. Malfoy really knew next to nothing about him. Even if he was right and Harry had stifled everything personal about himself in order to do his job well, how would _Malfoy, _of all people, know what lay underneath?

_He doesn't know shit. He's just making shit up so he can justify screwing around with me the way he used to do in school._

Harry knew it was true, but it still made him wince a bit, phrased like that. Malfoy really had changed even less than Harry had thought.

"_You have no idea what it did to me, when I heard," _Malfoy said, and his voice sank again, until Harry thought he wouldn't have heard him with the door shut between them—unusual for a Howler. "_I had to smile and laugh and pretend that it was an ordinary bit of gossip, like it doesn't matter to me what the Great Harry Potter says or does. And that's not true._"

"So sorry that you can't pretend to your gossip-mongering little friends that we're dating, anymore," Harry said, and tried to picture who Malfoy would have heard the news from and what he would have said. He ended up shaking his head. He couldn't imagine, which probably meant it hadn't happened, or else Malfoy moved in a world far different than the one that Harry lived in.

_Which I already knew, of course._

_"If you had the slightest idea what you mean to me,_" Malfoy whispered, his voice declining again, "_you wouldn't have done it._"

And then the Howler ripped itself to pieces. Harry sat back in the middle of the falling flakes of envelope and sighed, trying to understand the mindset behind a performance so stupid.

So Malfoy was afraid that people he had bragged to about having Harry in the palm of his hand would take offense. So what? It was still less than _diplomatic _to tell Harry that and try to push him to care for Malfoy that way. If anything, Harry was just more likely to take offense, and realize that he was a conquest to Malfoy and nothing more.

_Then again, he's never tried to hide that. What he expects to do is bowl me over so much that I won't care about having any deeper meaning to his actions._

Harry sighed and Vanished the pieces of the envelope, checked on Linton's letters, and then strode out of his office, heading briskly for the lifts before he could meet anyone. The last thing he wanted was to get caught talking with Ron or someone else who would want to know about his progress. He didn't _have _any concrete notes on his progress, yet.

_Only a reaction. And hope._

* * *

Harry twisted in the middle of his sheets, and then flung them off. The room was too hot, as though he had a roaring fire going in the hearth, and for a moment he wondered whether that came from the colors that Malfoy had enchanted onto the walls. It was just like him to try and make Harry uncomfortable in his own home, beyond the obvious ways he'd already done so.

"Look at _you_."

Harry turned his head and blinked. He was naked, he realized, because he had taken his robes off before going to bed; it was that intolerable _heat_.

And next to his bed stood Malfoy, having fought his way through the wards once again, it seemed. He was naked from the waist up, and his chest muscles shone under pale skin, sharply defined. As Harry watched, a line of sweat led down from his collarbone towards his sleek trousers. Harry licked his lips. It wasn't that he was attracted to Malfoy, he knew. But it had been so long since he'd had _anyone_, and watching Malfoy, he remembered the kisses and the way that the git had made him laugh more than he thought about the Howler or the owl that had destroyed Flowing's evidence.

"Am I good enough for you like this?" Malfoy asked softly, kneeling down on the bed with one leg only. His left hand reached out and slowly skimmed down Harry's chest, aiming for his waist. Harry shuddered uncontrollably and lifted a leg before he could stop himself, and Malfoy's hand wandered into the hollow between Harry's thigh and groin and remained there, comfortably, familiarly.

"Yes," Harry whispered. He would probably say anything as long as Malfoy kept touching him. His fingers felt madly good, rubbing up and down as he slowly began to move his hand again. Harry turned his head to the side and closed his eyes, his hips beginning to move as he pushed into the touch.

Then Malfoy pulled his hand away and said, "Try not to hate me too much when you wake up."

Harry opened his eyes—

And opened his eyes. He was lying in his bed, and there was nothing and no one with him. The room _was _warm, but not at the level that it had been in his—dream. Yes, it was a dream, and he had never found Malfoy attractive or appealing in any way.

Malfoy had sent him a dream curse.

Harry was hard.

He thought of the two facts in that order, and groped for his wand on the bedside table. He cast a spell that forced his erection to grow flaccid, gripping his lips in his teeth as he thought about it. The spell rippled over his groin as pain, and he winced, but he frankly didn't care. He didn't _want _to think about Malfoy. Not like that.

He wouldn't. He was going to find a way to take the spell off himself. He stood up and padded over to his bookshelves, full of the theoretical texts that the trainers had introduced them to when he was preparing to be an Auror and which he'd kept ever since.

And if some of the unexpected charge of the spell came from his own loneliness and not the fact that it was a curse…

Well, that was just too bloody fucking bad.


	9. This Means War

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Nine—This Means War_

Harry leaned back in his chair and yawned. Then he stared up at the ceiling and yawned. Then he reached for the warm cup of tea that Ron had brought in earlier and yawned.

"You all right, mate?"

Harry forced his eyes open against the pressure of his own weariness and managed to smile at Ron, who hovered next to his desk. "Fine, Ron. It's just—unexpected, you know?" Another yawn interrupted him before he could finish the sentence, and he had to stifle it so he could continue. "To have to look up a counter to that kind of curse when, as far as I know, Malfoy never cast it on me. It turns out it was a time-dependent spell. As soon as I did something he didn't like out of his sight, then I would start having those dreams."

Ron shuddered and looked as if he was keeping himself from throwing up with heroic effort. "Better you than me, mate. _Ugh_. Just thinking about it is enough to give me the shivers."

Harry snorted and closed his eyes again to snatch a moment of rest. "I know. Desiring someone like Malfoy, someone who's so convinced of his own superiority, isn't my idea of a fun time, either."

Ron said nothing, and a moment later, Harry forced his eye open and focused on him. Sure enough, Ron hadn't nodded and gone back to work; instead, he was staring at Harry the way he did when he disagreed but thought he might upset Harry if he said something.

"What?" Harry demanded. "Don't you think that I _wanted _to get rid of the spell?" Hell, the last thing he needed was Ron thinking that he _wanted _Malfoy—really wanted him, not just because of the spell.

"Well, yeah," Ron said, and scratched at the back of his neck, and stared into the far corner with a desperate nonchalance. "Of course."

"But," Harry said grimly, leaning forwards across his desk and making sure that there were no reports in the way that he might damage if he suddenly _needed _to punch Ron. "You always follow a statement like that with a _But_, don't you?"

Ron sighed and then said, "If I was thinking about a spell forcing me into dreaming of Malfoy, mate, the last thing I would care about was whether he was arrogant or not. _I _would be concerned because it was Malfoy, the git who harassed us in school. I would care about _that_. I wouldn't care so much about his character. His actions are enough for me."

"If you think that I don't care that he taunted you for your family and Hermione for hers," Harry began.

"No," Ron said, although there was a weird ripple of expressions under the surface of his face for a moment, as though he was fighting back things he didn't want Harry to see. "But it's shifted for you, hasn't it, mate? It was always different, anyway. Malfoy never taunted you about your family except to get a rise out of you, same as all the other times. It wasn't an impersonal hatred or a blood feud for him. It was always personal."

"I think hating you because his father hated your dad and hating Hermione because his father told him to hate Muggleborns is pretty personal, too," Harry said, letting his chair tilt forwards so that the front legs crashed against the floor. He stood up and prowled in a slow circle around the desk, his eyes fastened on Ron.

"And now you're angry, and I _hate _it when you're angry," Ron said plaintively, lifting his hands in front of him. "Harry. No. Really. I think the kind of hatred Malfoy has for you is different from the kind he has for me. I've always thought that."

Harry hesitated, and then said, "All right. Fine. Then I have no idea what you're saying about these dreams and that curse."

"That maybe your feeling towards him is personal, too," Ron said, looking him in the eye. "That you think differently about being cursed to desire him because—" Ron hesitated, visibly braced himself, but forged ahead. "Because you already do."

Harry didn't yell, didn't scream, which he thought was pretty big of him. He just counted to ten in his head, and then said, "You've been arguing all along that I'm obsessed with him. I can see that, and why. But I'm obsessed with seeing his arse in prison, not—not seeing his arse."

Ron raised his hands soothingly in front of him. "Whatever you say."

"And now you're _managing _me," Harry pointed out, his voice sinking in spite of himself into what Ron called "the dangerous territory." "The exact same way Hermione would."

"Not on purpose, Harry, not on purpose." Ron's face was so dreadfully earnest that Harry knew he had to believe him. "But just because it seems that you won't admit to yourself that part of the reason you chase him is your own desire. It's a good thing you removed the curse, of course it is. But remember what you told me when we were chasing the Surrey Singer?"

Harry shuddered. "Yeah." That had been a case where a Dark witch had learned spells that would give her voice a siren's power and had lured red-haired women to their deaths and then strangled them.

"That I couldn't see Ginny in all those victims, because I would lose control when I was chasing her," Ron said. "I had to understand what I was feeling and how to handle it. That did me a lot more good in the end than just running around screaming into the wind and feeling whatever I wanted would have. I think you need the same thing, mate. Understand what you're feeling for Malfoy, and you may be able to understand how best to catch him."

Harry reached out and put his hands on Ron's shoulders. Ron flinched, out of habit it seemed, before he looked into Harry's face and stood still.

_And it seems I'm the sort of person who regularly scares my best friends. Talk about understanding yourself._

"Thank you, Ron," Harry said quietly, giving him a little shake to emphasize that it was a good thing he had called Harry out on this. "Really. This—tells me that it's something I'll have to work on, if everyone else can see my obsession with Malfoy in those terms and I can't. It's a weakness if I don't acknowledge it."

Ron peered at him intently, and Harry tried to look open and helpful and whatever other thing he could to reassure him. Ron clapped him on the shoulder a moment later, and nodded. "You're welcome," he said. "It just tears me up to see you tearing _yourself _up, mate. And I think you can catch him better if you put energy into the chasing and less into explaining to yourself that you don't want him."

Harry snorted. "Probably true. Although I should wonder why I do. Prejudiced, arrogant, conceited arsehole that he is."

Ron cleared his throat. "There were times I wondered that about Hermione," he mumbled. "We fought so often, and sometimes she made me so _angry _that I just wanted to explode…"

"But?" Harry prompted, fascinated.

"There were other things," Ron murmured, staring up at the ceiling as if trying to call back memories of those distant days in Hogwarts. "Times when she would look at me and I would think that someone who made my heart beat that fast was better than someone who never made my heart beat at _all_. And times when I wanted to shout to the world that I loved her, and wasn't _that _enough? Against all the odds, against all the challenges?" Suddenly he seemed to remember where he was and who he was talking to, and broke off with a small laugh, rubbing the back of his neck. "Anyway. That's some of it. I think you might want Malfoy in the same way. Because he's someone who can make you scream in frustration and still want to catch him."

"To put him in prison," Harry said quietly. "Not to fuck him." He tried to ignore the memory of how badly his cock had throbbed even after he found the countercurse to the spell that Malfoy had cast on him.

"But you have to think about putting him in prison," Ron said, leaning forwards again as if he was going to fall off his chair. "The what, not the why. Concentrate on the why, and you'll only end up in this position again."

Harry winced at the thought of more dreams like last night's, more questions to himself about what the hell he was doing, more exchanges with Malfoy like the Howler. He'd been proud at the time, proud of provoking the response, but now that he thought about it, wasn't that more than a little childish? What did the Ministry pay him for, to be an Auror or to spend time playing games with someone who had openly acknowledged to Harry that he was a thief and trained other people in the Dark Arts? What mattered was that he belonged in prison. Harry had to acknowledge his personal feelings so that he could put them aside for a little while and focus on his bloody job.

"Yeah, you're right," he said, and punched Ron on the shoulder. "Thanks."

"There are two kinds of people in the world," Ron said solemnly. "Those who know I'm always right, and the ones who don't. Thank Merlin that you've finally joined the ranks of the enlightened."

Then he had to duck to avoid a seriously nasty curse that might have rendered him useless to Hermione for a couple of days, and at least gave him something else to think about besides his correct opinions.

* * *

Harry dressed himself with the help of the mirror again that night, and wore a dark green robe with golden buttons and silver trim that glittered in any kind of light and made him feel like a cross between a whore and a kid dressed up for a costume party.

_What matters is that this plan is going to work. Stop thinking about the way that you feel when you're doing it. What _matters _is that it's going to take Malfoy down._

Harry closed his eyes and spent a few minutes in a kind of meditation until he thought he could convince himself of that. Then he nodded and opened his eyes, and walked towards the entrance of his house.

As he reached for the door, he noticed a single, thin, golden line strung glittering across it. Harry pulled his hand back and narrowed his eyes. He knew that hadn't been there when he came home from the Ministry to dress, and Ron or Hermione would have mentioned it to him before they put something on his house, even a ward as harmless as this one looked like.

And, of course, it might not be harmless at all, depending on what it was designed to do…

Harry pulled out his wand and whispered the incantation he had devised himself, a twist on the usual spell to reveal the nature of a ward. This one ought to give a misty picture of the surrounding area at the time the ward was cast, and give him a glimpse of the person who had cast it, unless they had the foresight to use a Disillusionment Charm.

If it was who Harry thought it was, then he might have been too arrogant to use one, even in an area where someone could see him and decide that he was breaking into Harry's house.

And sure enough, there was Malfoy, standing out in the open, hawthorn wand swirling elegantly through familiar motions, ones that Harry didn't even have to glance at the words about the ward's nature that unscrolled in the air to identify. This was a spell that would tell someone when a particular person had left or entered a location.

The image faded and left Harry with twitching lips and a pounding heart—not that it ever didn't pound near Malfoy, as he realized now thanks to Ron, but this was a new kind of interest.

So Malfoy wanted to know when Harry entered and left the house, did he? Badly enough to cast the fucking spell in the first place, badly enough that he had sent Harry that Howler. Harry thought he could see that Howler in a different light, if he looked at it hard enough.

Harry's head went up, and he flung open the door and stalked out of the house, ignoring the ward as it broke with a faint harping sound and sent its invisible warning out to Malfoy, who would have to wait within a few miles to feel it.

This had all been a pretense so far, a way to lure Malfoy closer, to make him forget his caution, to make him do something that not all the deniability and smooth lying in the world could make the Ministry ignore.

But…

Now, Harry thought he _might _pick someone up after all at the Cycling Celebration, which he had never done before, and which Ron and Hermione might die of shock to hear him say.

Who was _Malfoy _to think he had sole claim to Harry? Who was _anyone _to think that they had a right of say over Harry's comings and goings, unless he _wanted _them to?

_Funny, _Harry thought, just before he spun in place and Apparated. His lips were parted as though to taste the air, his fingers tingling as though he had just come in from the cold. _I don't think I've felt this alive in years._

* * *

Harry stood at the entrance to the Sarcophagus, the wizarding establishment that housed the Cycling Celebration, and watched the shifting chaos below.

It was a cross between a Muggle club, a dance, and a never-ending party. The wizards and witches in the room wore elaborate robes, and Muggle clothing, and a mixture of both that would have made even Mr. Weasley snicker. No one cared, not in the constant rush of the music and the dancing and the drinks and the entertainments that sent fountains of sparks into the air and made people gathered around planks and tables and small dark pools inset into the floor sometimes start back and sometimes cheer and sometimes wipe ashes and soot off their faces. Harry knew that George used the place as one of the prime testing grounds for the newest Wheezes. There was always _someone _who would try anything at the Cycling Celebration.

A broad flight of shallow steps led down from the entrance where Harry stood—not the only one, as the constant rush of banging doors and windows from other directions showed. Harry turned and strode down them, not bothering to hide his scar. In fact, as a few people glanced up at him in interest (there was also always someone at the Cycling Celebration looking for something new), he cast a minor charm that swished his hair back and revealed it.

Someone gasped; someone else made a low, hungry sound that fired Harry's blood to hear it. He pretended to ignore them and worked his way towards one of the numerous tables that contained a lot to drink and rather less to eat, breath coming slightly faster in excitement as he imagined the way that they would _stare _at him.

And that at least some of them would _want_. There were people out there, idiots, who imagined that somehow sleeping with the Chosen One would be different from anyone else they'd ever slept with. Let them think about it, let them dream about it. Harry had always avoided them.

Now he would welcome even their touch. In fact, that might be more useful, since it would irritate Malfoy more to be rejected for someone so shallow. He probably imagined that what he could offer Harry was _not _shallow, somehow.

He reached the table and ordered "the hottest drink you have." The man there, with bright red hair and a dragon tattoo in full flight across his cheek, considered him a minute, and then grinned.

"In what sense?" he asked.

"All the senses," Harry said firmly, listening as the crowd behind him shifted and someone moved closer. Then he was temporarily deafened by someone screaming from behind him as their game or trick blew up in their face. He couldn't hear any more longing words, but he thought he could feel the longing stares.

"A drink to match the drinker," the man said, and bowed his head a little before he turned away to snatch up glasses and pour different kinds of alcohol together. Harry leaned his elbows on the table, a block of white marble, or some more common stone enchanted to resemble marble, the height of his chest, and turned to watch the crowd.

Someone was near him, wearing powder blue robes, and Harry looked up with a smile of welcome—

And Malfoy bent down over him, one arm sliding behind his shoulders, mouth arranged in a smirk, lips parted, and fury in his eyes.

"Did you think that you were less mine because you came _here_?" he whispered.

Harry, in that delicious moment of poised dizziness before he chose which direction to shatter, could think only, _Challenge accepted._


	10. Shift In a Moment

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Ten—Shift in a Moment_

"Come dance with me."

Malfoy didn't give Harry a lot of choice; he was already towing him in the direction of a crowd of people whose movements were a bit more rhythmic than the ones around them, suggesting dancing if you squinted. Harry let his mouth form a devilish smile, or one that he hoped was devilish—

And walked where Malfoy pushed him.

Part of it was simple curiosity. Part of it was the audacity that had overcome him the moment he saw the ward Malfoy had left on his door, and told him that no one else was going to control _him_, unless he chose to follow along. Part of it was the desire to throw Malfoy off and make him wonder what Harry was going to do next. From the way that Malfoy paused several times on the way there, if only for a second at a time, told Harry that that was working.

And part of it was desire, pure and simple.

Ron had been right, damn him. Harry's mouth dried out when he watched Malfoy move, and only some of it came from thinking about caging him at last and denying him the ability to run off and train anyone else in the Dark Arts. More of it came from the smooth roll of Malfoy's hips, from the length of his legs and his neck when he turned his head to the side and the Sarcophagus's constantly shifting lights caught on his face, and the spark in his eyes when he at last turned to face Harry.

Harry expected Malfoy to ask if he could dance, to taunt him about the disaster that had been the Yule Ball, to make some demand that would come out as an insult, given the fire that still burned in his eyes. But he did none of those things. He whisper-hissed, "Dance with me," instead, and arched his head back to the music, his body pressing in until his hips were the leading portion of him and jabbed into Harry's stomach.

He was hard. Of course he was. And Harry, stepping further in and rubbing his groin against Malfoy's as he arched higher on his toes, wasn't even trying to pretend that he wasn't, as well.

Malfoy faltered in his smooth, twisting dance steps, to what music Harry wasn't sure, because of all the many different kinds that dashed and clashed through the air around them. Then he leaned down and stared at Harry with his masks cracked to pieces and a surprisingly young face showing under them.

_I think it's all his masks, _Harry reminded himself, even as his heart bounded like a wild hare to meet Malfoy's gaze. _That doesn't mean it is, and it doesn't mean that he would let me see the real him, no matter what. The real him is a thief and a liar, a Dark Arts master and a Slytherin. I can't trust him._

"You _do _want me," Malfoy said, the thick emotion in his voice soft as a spring breeze. For a moment, his fingers slid hesitantly up and down Harry's cheek, down and back to the nape of his neck.

Then he seized him in a kiss wilder than any of the ones they had shared so far and whirled him to the side, making Harry laugh in spite of himself as they began a furious dance. Their cloaks and hips banged into and blinded the people around them, and those people moved to the side, complaining only a little. At the Cycling Celebration, most of those attending expected to be bumped eventually.

"You could come with me, now," Malfoy panted, breaking the kiss. His hair was mussed, some pieces standing on end, although Harry couldn't imagine how, since both of their hands were locked considerably lower on each other's bodies. Maybe it had picked up on the pure electric nervousness radiating from Malfoy and stood up on its own. "Come with me. I have a room near here—I have all these rooms, all these havens—Harry, I want to show them all to you, and show you _me_—"

Harry pulled back with a sucking-in of air and a shake of his head, and thought, full of wonder himself but for a different reason, _He's forgotten what I am. He promises to show me his secrets, but he assumes nothing else can compare with _himself. _That must be the reason I danced with him, he thinks, that must be the reason that I'm here and nothing else—_

A whisper in the back of his mind arose then and dashed itself through his thoughts. _Is that because I'm the only thing that matters to him, out of the Ministry and the Aurors and everything else I represent? _

It was a disturbing thought, and Harry shook his head again to deal with it. Malfoy's hands tightened on his arms, and he moved in again. Too close this time, crush of cloth to skin, crush of erections, and Harry swayed and winced, somewhere on the line between pleasure and pain.

"You want me," Malfoy whispered. "I came here to seek you. Why should we wait? If you were still ignoring me or playing hard to get, that would be one thing, but I _came _for _you_, and you didn't say no."

Harry met his eyes and gave him a mean little smile. He had to remind himself that the flirtation was only flirtation, and separate from what he felt. He couldn't have sex with Malfoy not because he had to keep himself pure or anything like that, but because it would compromise the arrest he would otherwise need permission to wring out of Thorin.

"You think that you're worth giving everything up for?" Harry flicked his fingers at the air, delighted that he could tell the truth and not even have to make up a lie. "You think that I'll compromise myself and my status as an Auror just like _that_, for a face , a body, a fuck I could find in anyone here?"

Unexpectedly, Malfoy smiled, and there was a dark fire in his face that Harry had never seen before. Malfoy had sounded furious in the Howler, and delighted when he broke into Harry's home to decorate it, but this was something deeper than either one of them, a combination of them that made Harry tighten his hands on Malfoy's arms before he thought better of it.

"Do I think that I'm better than them?" Malfoy breathed, bowing his head and blowing a stream of warm air along the side of Harry's neck. "No. I _know _that I'm better than that. That there's no one in here who can satisfy you like I do."

"Like you _could_, you mean," Harry said, and tilted his head, meeting Malfoy's eyes and holding them, refusing to allow them to move away. "Given that you've never been allowed to satisfy those needs yet."

Malfoy gave him a smile that curved up at the corners and said, "You are correct in your use of modal verbs. Allow me to substitute another one of them for _could_, however. That one is _will_."

Harry opened his mouth to correct that use to "would," and then stopped and arched his back urgently, because Malfoy's hand was down his pants, and it was a little hard to do anything else.

It was—it wasn't unpleasant, as the long, slender fingers slid along his cock and down, nails teasing at the insides of his thighs. Of course it wasn't, and Harry didn't need Ron to tell him that pretending it was would have been a lie.

But he couldn't catch his breath, either, and he couldn't stop thinking that someone would _see_ even with the press of bodies all around them, and he couldn't stop thinking that it was unprofessional, and he couldn't stop his cheeks from heating up and his breath from heating up and his body from heating up.

He was hotter than the promised drink would have made him.

He could have stopped it, the same way he could have stopped the kiss in the Leaky Cauldron. And there were the same excellent reasons to stop it. Thorin might hear of it—he might get in trouble—this was _Malfoy_, and he shouldn't be letting Malfoy arouse him that way—

But the reasons buzzed and hammered behind a closed door, and it was something else entirely that made Harry reach out and catch Malfoy's wrist, shaking his head.

"Why not?" Malfoy demanded, breathless. Harry looked up, and his heart bounded. Malfoy was looking at him with his eyes a blind, dazzling grey, and his hands trembling, and his hair trembling around him, too, with the force of his shaking head. Harry didn't know whether he was denying the way Harry held his hand or his own thoughts, and it didn't matter.

"I've already been in trouble once for doing this in public," Harry said, and that still wasn't the reason for stopping, or the reason for the way he squeezed Malfoy's hand, low and hard on the wrist, promising, tempting, teasing. "Why don't you come with me, and we'll make sure that there's no one else around to witness us?"

Malfoy bowed his head and nibbled the edge of Harry's ear. "I thought," he breathed, while his tongue and his teeth drove Harry to distraction and somehow never interrupted or tangled his words, "that you would never let me do that. That you came here to be in public."

"I came here to see if you would follow me," Harry said, pulling back and staring up into Malfoy's face. Lies and truth mingled in his voice and his mind, and his tongue might have tripped over itself if he tried to clarify matters. He didn't try. He squeezed both of Malfoy's hands, which he held now, and murmured, "That part of it worked. Now I want to see your boast proved true."

Malfoy's eyelashes flickered up and down—long pale eyelashes, Harry thought absently, but darker than he would have expected from the color of Malfoy's hair. Malfoy cleared his throat roughly and then whispered, "I know that you want to catch me. I shouldn't trust you as far as I can throw you."

"That's one way of looking at it," Harry said, and leaned forwards to nuzzle up against Malfoy's neck. He stuck his tongue out, the way he had never done before, and scraped it up the skin. Malfoy's legs buckled, and a strong taste of salt filled Harry's mouth. He wasn't sure which result he liked better.

"I shouldn't trust you," Malfoy said in a husky whisper, and his head hung sideways, baring the other side of his throat to Harry's curious tongue. Harry tasted the salt, and his ears heard the buzz of Malfoy's breathing, and his fingers bit into Malfoy's hips and felt the slenderness of the bones there and the sway of his legs, and he smelled sweat and pre-come, and his eyes closed with blackness.

"I know you shouldn't," Harry said. "But I tempt you anyway. You're going to take me to bed _anyway_, because you can never resist a challenge, and you hope that you can turn me away from the Ministry at the same time as I'm trying to find an excuse to put you in prison." His voice was clear, fluent, although he felt as close to drunk as he'd ever come without touching alcohol in the same evening. His legs kept up the steps of the dance, such as they were, and his chest drummed on emptiness. "You want me. And there's nothing wrong with sleeping with an Auror, nothing criminal about it. Unless you're trying to bribe me and I'm the Auror on the case."

Malfoy laughed, and his voice was thick as he stooped down to Harry. "Come with me."

He must have had a Portkey, because the Cycling Celebration had anti-Apparition wards up; there was too much chance, with the constant crowd, that someone Apparating in wouldn't arrive in a clear space. Harry found himself in a room made dim with dark red tapestries on the wall, and thick with both their breathing, and crushed to Malfoy's chest in the next moment, Malfoy's tongue down his throat.

But Harry kept his head this time; the jerking sensation of the Portkey in his stomach helped, and for once he was grateful that he hated that feeling. He pulled back from the kiss, and smiled at Malfoy, and dropped to one knee, reaching out with his hands to cradle Malfoy's hips and hold him there, smoothing down the cloth that covered him.

Malfoy looked at him once again with those drowning eyes, and a shiver traced through Harry's body, the path that it had traced more than once before. To have such _power _over someone, why did Malfoy give it to him, it was ridiculous to think that he didn't know what was going on…

But they both knew what was going on, and this was about the edges of what they could get away with, and the moment that one of them would finally break and—

And what? Harry didn't think he knew, but it would be a grand shattering.

He intended to be the one who did the breaking, not the one who broke.

He looked up at Malfoy for a few moments in silence, and then he leaned forwards and rested the palm of his hand flat over the bulge at Malfoy's groin.

Malfoy tilted his head back and groaned urgently, his hips snapping forwards as though he was trying to control himself and failing. That was just what Harry had hoped for, of course, so he gave Malfoy a mysterious smile and rested his cheek against the erection when Malfoy had stopped moving.

He shuddered himself at feeling the head of Malfoy's cock dent his cheek, as if it was already inside his mouth. Then again, if he played this right, that last part wouldn't be happening at all. He turned his head to the side and opened his mouth.

Malfoy groaned brokenly and reached out with both hands, plunging his fingers into Harry's tangled hair. He began to push, rubbing the head of his cock insistently against Harry's lips and the tip of his extended tongue. Harry smiled up at him, and whatever Malfoy saw in his smile—which didn't have _that _much promise, as far as Harry knew—made him groan again and jab his hips forcefully.

"Don't look at me like that, with all the world burning in your smile," he whispered. "_Suck _me."

But Harry still didn't intend for that to happen, just to give him his own cover of plausible lies in case Thorin should ask if he'd touched Malfoy with his mouth. Instead, he tugged Malfoy's trousers gently down, revealing the fine cloth of his pants. Harry reached out and cupped his hands in the air around Malfoy's cock. He kept looking at the wet spot on the front of the pants, and found it hard to take his eyes away.

"Touch me," Malfoy whispered, gasping at the end of the words as if it had taken all his breath to say them.

Harry shook his head. His mouth was thick, full, dripping with wetness. He would find it hard to refuse anything that Malfoy might ask of him right now, he thought, but some things, he still could.

_Because he isn't asking the right things._

"Just a moment," he said, and crooked his little fingers towards the sides of Malfoy's shaft, opening his mouth wider and wider. He eased his head closer, closer, his tongue dipping out and forming a curve, his jaws parting until he knew Malfoy could see his lips folded over his teeth.

Malfoy's breath sounding as if he was on his deathbed, so quick, so sudden. Harry reached out with one little finger and skimmed the cloth over the head, murmuring, "And what would you do if you found yourself in me, all that heat you've dreamed of, able to shut me up just by thrusting your hips—"

Malfoy cried out and tilted his head back. Harry got a good view of his chin, and the dusky flush along his throat, and knew that he was a moment away from coming.

He blew, gently, along the soaked cloth, and this time let both his little fingers come to rest on Malfoy.

Malfoy came in his pants, pumping, grabbing at Harry's hair again. Harry let Malfoy drag his head towards him and rub and root some more, well-content. As long as Malfoy was the one who had succumbed this time and not Harry, there was the chance that he would trust against his will, give his secrets away not because he was choosing to but because he wanted so desperately to impress Harry, and—

Harry became aware that his heart and his cock seemed to share one beat, and that his hand itched with the desire to reach down and stroke himself.

But that didn't _matter. _It couldn't be allowed to matter.

Instead, Harry caught Malfoy gracefully as he collapsed and laid him on the room's bed, a large one covered with a red canopy and blankets. Harry wondered for a moment if the blankets were meant to be a compliment to him, Gryffindor colors, but it seemed impossible, and he put the thought aside a moment later.

"Stay," Malfoy said voicelessly, catching Harry's wrist with one hand and appealing more with his eyes than anything else.

Harry waited until Malfoy fell asleep, kissed his forehead, cast the spell that subdued his own erection, and then began to move around the room. He had already felt that Malfoy's wards were tuned to him, and wouldn't prevent him from Apparating out; he had to wonder how long _that _had been true.

So none of them should snap at him if he did a little judicious snooping, either.

And he ignored the memory of Malfoy's skin and hands and eyes, because he couldn't get any work done if he thought about them. His tactics had changed, and he had to thank Ron for the insight that had made them do so. But that still didn't mean he was going to change _other _things.


	11. Secrets Exposed

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Eleven-Secrets Exposed_

Harry used spells to open the drawers, the cabinets, the cupboards, and the doors in Malfoy's flat, as it quickly revealed itself to be once he got beyond the bedroom where Malfoy had got off. Everything was decorated in the same dark red colors that had marked the curtains and bedclothes in that room. Harry shrugged a shoulder up when he thought about it. He had to pick and choose what was bloody significant when it came to Malfoy, as something that seemed important could always mean something else.

Nothing, and more nothing. Well, not _nothing. _Cutlery that looked like it was pure silver in the kitchen, and an old china tea set with one dish chipped, and more linen than Harry had known any sane person would keep on hand in some of the cupboards, and old portraits that stared at him when he opened the doors to some of the smaller bedrooms, and a few plants with bright white flowers on them that Harry carefully avoided. With his luck, they would turn out to have a soporific scent, and Malfoy would discover him dozing on the floor in the morning.

But nothing that seemed important. No secret documents, no letters like the ones that he had sent to Linton, and no illegal Potions ingredients, which Harry would have recognized even if he didn't know how to use them.

_Maybe this is just a place where he doesn't conduct his business, _Harry thought, rapping his fingers against a small, grimy window that nonetheless gazed out on an enchanted scene of the Atlantic Ocean. _Or, more likely, he wasn't dazed enough by lust to bring me to a place where I could learn more about his business._

Harry sighed. Well, for that he had no one to blame but himself. He had known Malfoy wanted him. He should have made sure that it was enough to baffle his brain and get him to surrender his secrets _before _he made the git pass out.

And then he turned around and caught sight of himself in a mirror on the back of a cupboard door that he'd opened. A strange place to keep a mirror, but Harry had already cast several common spells on it that would have detected magic, and knocked on the frame, and tried to cut out a bit of the glass, and found nothing unusual about it.

This sight, though, made Harry go still. The mirror's gilded frame was shaped to add a thick mane of curling hair and a flowing beard to whoever looked into it, as well as downwards-slanting eyebrows that made Harry look more like Dumbledore than he was comfortable contemplating.

But now Harry also saw that his eyes shone more in the mirror than they should, as if there was a light source behind the glass. He cast a _Finite, _but nothing happened. If anything, the glow grew a little brighter.

Harry's heart was going faster than usual, but each beat in his ears was so huge and so complex that it _felt _slow. It couldn't-Malfoy couldn't have been so stupid as to make _Harry _the key to his secrets, could he? Harry's magic and reflection and eye color and, oh, other things?

Only one way to find out, and despite the fact that Malfoy could have used almost anything to key the magic on the mirror, Harry was suddenly sure that this was the right way to go about it. He leaned close to the glass and breathed out, "Harry," trying to imagine his name the way a lover might say it.

_I don't actually have all that much experience with that._

Before he could feel sorry for himself, though, the mirror shuddered and spun in its frame, the glass beginning to melt into silvery mist. Harry jerked his head back to avoid breathing in the mist, but it turned out he needn't have. It flowed straight up into the golden hair and eyebrows, and then straight back down, making the space that was left glow with the same strange green light that had reflected in his eyes when the mirror was intact. Harry reckoned that Malfoy must open it most of the time with either a conjured image of him or just his name.

He shifted in place as he thought about that. Malfoy was _weirdly _obsessed, with Harry's name and appearance and power. It was as though he had imagined Harry at his side long before he began to court him.

_Well, of course he did, _Harry thought then, and scowled. _As you knew. As you started taking advantage of at the Cycling Celebration. You knew he desired you, or you wouldn't have dressed up like a whore-_he scowled down at his robes in turn-_and tried to seduce him. You knew this. And plenty of other people have been weirdly obsessed with you before. Voldemort ought to have been enough for a lifetime of practice._

He still felt odd as he stood there and watched Malfoy's mirror disappear, revealing a straight passage back into what was probably a bit of wizardspace, since it was definitely much larger than the door of the cupboard could have contained. Harry leaned and looked, without trying to touch. Opened to his name or not, Malfoy probably still had traps on this cache that only he knew how to disarm.

A gleaming pile of Galleons appeared. A golden cauldron. As Harry moved his head sideways, a stack of Muggle money neatly wrapped in string. And then-

Harry began to breathe faster, exactly as if Malfoy had managed to make _him _come before he lay down.

_Got you!_

There was the resplendent rainbow gleam of a sea serpent egg, a huge one like a faceted diamond, the kind that were so rare the Ministry had instituted a penalty of a year in Azkaban for simply possessing one, whether or not you intended to steal or sell one. There had been one poor bastard last year who got six months simply for holding one when a fleeing thief thrust it into his arms and Apparated away. Sea serpents were too rare in the first place, and temperamental in the way they guarded their nests, which meant that most people who had stolen eggs killed the parents and made them rarer still.

_But, of course, the eggs are valuable in all sorts of rare potions, _Harry thought, his forehead covered with sweat and his body swaying. _And that's all that matters to people like _him.

"I didn't expect you to get this far."

Malfoy's arms were around his waist, Malfoy's chin resting on his shoulder. Absurdly, the only thing Harry could think of as he shut his eyes and stood perfectly still was that, if he had left the mirror intact, it would have reflected Malfoy behind him and prevented him from taking Harry by surprise.

"I didn't expect you to find even one of my little secrets here, let alone how deeply attuned to you they are," Malfoy said idly, and swept his fingers down Harry's flank to his waist, rooting in the robes there. He was still naked; Harry could feel the skin almost buzzing with warmth next to his back and his cock stirring gently to life against Harry's arse. "But now you know. At the very least, you can't deny that I want you now, deny what else you will." He bit Harry's ear, and Harry gasped. He was caught in some unreal world, between the thrill of discovery and the pain of discovery.

Malfoy's hand slipped around to the front of Harry's groin and cupped his cock. Harry choked and gripped his arm, and that was how he found out that he was already half-hard, his shaft jutting forwards as if yearning for Malfoy's touch.

"And you want me, too," Malfoy whispered into his ear.

Harry had one, shining moment to decide what to do. It couldn't be denial; he doubted Malfoy would believe him now. And it couldn't be denial of the fact that he had acted like an Auror on a mission, either. Malfoy had _caught _him looking at the sea serpent's egg. He _knew_.

Harry twisted around and gave Malfoy a hard little smile. And decided to go with what he was best at, in the end: the truth.

"I know you want me," he said. "I also know that you're a thief of the highest kind, and that I have enough knowledge to expose you to the Ministry."

"Of course you do," Malfoy said, very gentle, very low, watching him without a smile but with the _possibility _of a smile sparking in the air all around him. "And I might get a year in Azkaban for the sea serpent egg."

Harry stared at him. "That doesn't worry you?" he asked at last, when he had his voice back.

"You've seen the egg," Malfoy said, his hands still sliding up and down Harry's ribs. Harry tried not to think about how naked he was, even though it was extremely distracting. "_I_ can't deny that much, either. But there are ways to make even a year in Azkaban pleasant, when you have as much money and as many contacts as I do." He paused reflectively. "Besides, have you thought about what would happen to you once I was arrested?"

Harry straightened. Here might be proof that Thorin was in Malfoy's pay. "If you think you can threaten me," he began.

"Oh, no," Malfoy breathed, his stare drilling through Harry's skull. "With nothing but the loss of an obsession. What happens to _you_ if I'm arrested, hm? What happens to the desire to catch me that's driven you through all these cases, arresting people like Linton and trying to get closer to me?"

Harry frowned. Malfoy seemed to be making a threat, but on the face of it, it was an absurd one. Harry didn't understand, and waited for some more clarifying words.

Malfoy didn't seem inclined to give them. He waited, instead, his hands on Harry's hips, his gaze so direct and clear and amused that Harry finally shook his head and muttered, "I would find something else to do. Someone else to chase. I would finally be able to concentrate on my _work_. And meanwhile, I could know that you were where you belonged, and you were never getting out of it."

Malfoy laughed. Harry hated that part of him vibrated to that sound, and not physically, either. Malfoy then shook his head and locked eyes with Harry, so silently amused that Harry wanted to fume. Malfoy would feel that emotion, though, as close as they were, so Harry just strove to look bored.

"You've spent the better part of your career chasing me," Malfoy whispered. "Those interviews you gave early on, about how you were disappointed that I hadn't spent my new freedom on something more 'moral?' I was the only former Death Eater you were willing to talk about, including the dead ones. And then you became convinced I was a thief long before anyone else was."

"You _are _a thief!" Harry gestured at the compartment still open in the mirror. "All I need to do is tell someone that I saw a sea serpent egg in your possession, and they'll raid! You _know _that! The Ministry takes that crime too seriously to allow any suspicion of it to pass uninvestigated!"

He was regretting more and more now that Malfoy had woken up. All he'd have had to do was escape, even with a Pensieve memory, and that likely would have been enough proof to satisfy Thorin.

"I know," Malfoy said. "But you only ran into the evidence to support that relatively recently. Before that, you still _believed. _Fervently. Fiercely. When even your partner had to doubt the way you pursued me. Why? Why is it so important to you, Harry, to know what's going on with me, to know what I'm doing, to believe that I'm doing something important and moral?" He leaned against Harry now, forcing him back towards the mirror. "I want to know."

Harry ground his teeth. "Because I knew what you were," he said bitterly. "Those letters you sent me gave me hints. The documents that we found in the possession of the people you trained gave me hints. You think you can fool a trained investigator forever, Malfoy? Not me. I _saw _you."

"Why shouldn't I think that I was able to fool them?" Malfoy lifted his eyebrows. "I fooled the whole cluster of them in the Auror Department, who thought I was nothing more than a harmless philanthropist attempting to make up for my less than bright past." Effortlessly, he imitated the diction and accent of the _Prophet _reporters who were always badgering Harry for comments. "Why were you different?"

"Because-"

"Yes, I know what you mean about greater skills," Malfoy said, and smiled at him. "I'm even willing to concede that your skills are greater than those of most people among the Aurors. I make it a point to fancy only the best, after all."

Harry stared at him. How did Malfoy take every point Harry could have brought up to clear himself or make things go back to the way they should be, and turn it _against _him? If Harry believed in the Devil, he would definitely think that Malfoy had made a bargain of some sort with him.

But he could defeat that advantage, if he was willing to keep telling the truth. Malfoy might think that he had more of an advantage there than Harry had, because Harry had come so late to a realization of his own desires, but not now. Not when Harry had the power to bring up the past and _hurt _him with it.

"Because I tracked you in school," Harry said. "Because I always understood you for what you are, and knew you hadn't changed."

"Tell me what I am."

Malfoy's eyes were big, his voice unearthly, and somewhere in the back of his mind Harry knew this was surreal. Normal Aurors didn't stand in front of the criminals they were chasing and tell them off, especially when the criminals were _naked._

_And normal Aurors don't dress up in their best robes and take their criminal clients out for a dance and a blowjob, either._

"You were a coward," Harry said. "Not a horrible person, but someone who kept making all the wrong decisions. You didn't go for help when you should have. You thought you could handle the task Voldemort asked you to do all by yourself, and you _couldn't. _You didn't identify me when the Snatchers brought me to your house, and you were smart enough to accept my help in the Fiendfyre when I pulled you out. Those were the only two things you did right during the entire war."

Malfoy reached up and touched the skin over his heart, spreading his fingers and pretending to examine imaginary blood on them. "The next time I ask you to tell me what I am," he murmured, "I think I'll need to be wearing protective gear first."

Harry leaned forwards. "You still are," he said. "Instead of making something of yourself since the war, you turned to the Dark Arts. Seductive, aren't they? Feel good, don't they? And you corrupted other people the way that Voldemort and your father did. Only you used Dark magic instead of fear or bribes."

Malfoy looked at him with eyes that were calm and bright and tearless again, and slightly shook his head. "You said it more harshly than I would have," he murmured. "But don't you think that I _knew _I was a coward? That I didn't have the strength to make the right decisions? Since the war, this has been a way to-"

"What? Make the right decisions?" Harry gestured back at the sea serpent egg again, so angry he could barely speak. "Even if you didn't kill the parents yourself, you bought the egg from someone who did, and that means death and _extinction_-"

Malfoy reached in with a murmured spell (which was the first time it really dawned on Harry that he was holding his wand), and summoned out the sea serpent egg. Then he twisted something on the side and held it up in front of Harry.

It was an empty set of halves, with no yolk inside it and no trace of a young serpent. Harry's fingers trembled as he folded them into his palm. "You blew out the yolk," he muttered. "I know that some people can do that."

"Touch the shell," Malfoy said, and offered it towards Harry. "It's made of glass. It's fake, a decoy that tricks some people into thinking I'm much richer than I am and thus someone they want to deal with." He snorted. "I didn't fool the Ministry for years by leaving evidence like this lying around where an Auror could find it, Harry. Even _you_."

Harry shut his eyes. His heartbeat was going fast and feeling slow, again. He had to have some time to recover. "What did you mean, then, when you said that you did this after the war for-some reason?" he asked. "It can't be that you wanted proof that you could make the right decisions. Because you _know _that these aren't those!"

His voice had soared on the end of those words. He bit the inside of his cheek and tried his best to calm down.

And he heard nothing from Malfoy. He opened his eyes to see Malfoy staring at him intently.

"I did it to prove that I wasn't a coward," Malfoy said, his gaze and hands rock-steady as he reached up to cup Harry's chin. "I can't be, not with the risks I take, risks that could get me captured or killed or at least arrested. And to prove that I could resist the judgment I saw in your eyes before you turned away from me in the Great Hall." He leaned nearer and held his lips next to Harry's, an inch away from kissing him, as he whispered, "But I wonder if you don't need some lessons in bravery."

Whirling colors, like a Portkey, seized Harry, and he found himself standing in a short alley off Diagon, near an Apparition point that would lead him back home, with the sun rising.


	12. This Is The End

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Twelve-This Is The End_

"Oh, Harry."

Hermione's voice was no more than a breath. Harry lifted his head and stared at her. They were sitting at a table behind Ron and Hermione's house. Hermione had constructed a huge glassed-in area there, during the time when she was most enthusiastic about ancient wizarding architecture, and it was pleasant most of the time, being able to watch the weather around them without getting soaked by rain or touched by wind. Now, though, it seemed coldness beat out from the glass, and even the sympathetic hand Hermione laid on his arm. Harry shivered.

"You're disappointed," he said, then paused and told himself that his voice did _not _sound dull in his own ears. That things still had color after his latest collision with Malfoy. That he was acting like a child to think lots of things had changed.

But then, if he was, what was the difference? He had been acting like a child all along, to hear Malfoy and Ron and Hermione tell it.

"Only because you're so disappointed in yourself," Hermione said gently. She shifted on the small round stools that she'd insisted the glass room had to be furnished with because ancient wizards would have done it that way, and frowned. "If you had chosen to date Malfoy on your own, sleep with him on your own, then, well, it would be strange to me, but I would respect that it was your decision. But this way...you're not doing anything but getting yourself trapped further in activities that you have to deny to the Auror Department."

Harry grunted and nodded, and, at her nudge, finished the glass of cold water she'd put in front of him. He wondered if some of the harsh grit at the corners of his eyes came from lack of sleep. He _had _been all up night, seducing Malfoy, or allowing himself to be seduced, and then creeping around Malfoy's house.

But once he could have done that and felt nothing but fresh and righteous in the morning. He reckoned that that had been when he was pursuing criminals who were actually criminals.

Or people he didn't _sleep _with. He could feel his face burning now when he thought about that, and took a large swallow of water in the vain hope that that would cool things down.

Hermione sighed and rubbed his arm, apparently able to sense what he was thinking. "All right. So you have to decide what you're going to do from here. And it has to be something new. Reporting to Thorin doesn't work. Ignoring Malfoy doesn't work, not if he's going to destroy other people's property and get other Aurors in trouble when you do. Sleeping with him and hoping that he'll be dazed and dazzled enough to accept anything you do after that doesn't work."

Harry smiled briefly at her. He really did like the way that Hermione's voice only faltered a little on the words "sleeping with him." He nodded and drank the rest of his water. "I have to find something else," he said. "You're right. The problem is that I don't really know what it should be. And it's hard enough coming up with ways to justify sleeping with him, never mind pursuing the case."

Hermione bit her lip. "How sure are you that he's guilty?"

Harry stared at her, then snorted. "He gave me a stolen opal that the French Aurors had turned themselves inside out trying to find. He's admitted that he trains other people in the Dark Arts. That's without the illegal Potions ingredients that he's also admitted to having. Yeah, I'm sure that he's guilty. The problem is convincing Thorin of it without some kind of direct evidence. Even the opal he gave me could have come, as Thorin insists, from someone else. He _could _say that he bought it from someone else without knowing it was stolen."

"Then Thorin won't really accept anything, it sounds like," Hermione said. "Not if stolen property he gave you from his own hands wasn't good enough."

"You're probably right about that," Harry said, and thought for a moment, then shook his head. "Unfortunately, I don't really see that it changes anything. If I try to take myself off the case, well, we know what will happen."

"Then try to negotiate with him outside the strictures of the Ministry," Hermione said, eyes shining as she leaned forwards. Harry remembered that she had tried negotiation with several members of her own Departments in the Ministry, and had splendid results. Of course, he didn't know that any of them had had the sheer pig-headedness of Thorin or Malfoy's slipperiness. "Tell him that you're coming to a meeting with him in good faith."

"He won't maintain it," Harry said. "Hermione, this is someone who destroyed Flowing's evidence and broke into my home to redecorate it just because he _could_. I can't trust anything he tells me."

"You've trusted most everything he's said about himself so far," Hermione pointed out dryly. "That he's a renowned thief, that he wants you, that he trains other thieves. You can trust him this far."

"Fine, fair," Harry said, shifting in place. "But what would I tell him that I wanted to negotiate _about?_ There's nothing I can offer him except, well, what I already did." He became aware that his face was all one fiery blush, and began to wish he had taken the time to change out of his fine dress robes before he came over to Hermione's. Fine, he had been a whore, there was no need to flaunt it in front of his best friends. "And everything else...I've tried everything I can think of."

"Except that," Hermione pointed out again. "As for what you'll negotiate about, why don't you leave that up to him for once? Just tell him that you want to speak to him about it, and I think he'll come up with plenty of things to discuss on his own."

Harry gave a wavering snort as he imagined the kinds of things that Malfoy might want to discuss-

And then thought again of that moment in the corridor when Malfoy had looked at him and told him that _he _needed lessons in bravery, and the tumult of gold and courage that had poured through him when he walked out the door of his house. No one was going to put wards on him that would watch and restrict his movements, he had sworn. He didn't like the idea of someone dragging him into a negotiation, either.

But if he set the terms and the time, and perhaps let Malfoy pick the place, then he would be choosing it, as Hermione said. Even if Malfoy _did _end up controlling the conversation, in some ways.

"All right," he said, "I'll try that." _I'll show him that I'm not afraid of anything he might say to me. I'll go to him, and try to get this settled once and for all. At this point, I'd accept leaving the case up to someone else as long as he promises not to attack the other Aurors._

_ I'll try anything once. Especially if I can get rid of this shame and this-irritation._

* * *

Harry leaned back against the smooth, white wooden back of the chair behind him, and then cringed and leaned forwards again. Although he wore a perfectly clean set of ordinary robes, not fancy ones and not Auror robes either, he still had the impression that he might dirty or smudge something somehow.

Malfoy had demanded that they meet in a restaurant called the Three Blossoms that had been built on the edge of Hogsmeade shortly after the war. Harry had never been inside it, and had agreed without much thought. He only knew it was expensive, and so pretty much the sort of place that Malfoy, by definition, _would _pick.

But inside, it had turned out to be as delicate and quiet as a library, with everything done in white: windows of frosted glass, pale wrought iron railings around gardens full of lilies and white roses, marble steps, birch-wood chairs, tables that glittered like diamonds and which Harry wasn't prepared to swear weren't carved diamonds. And the three-flowers motif was everywhere, thorns pricking Harry's back if he _did _forget and try to relax.

This wasn't the sort of place he belonged. A high-class thief, though, would fit in nicely. Harry was caught between wincing and fuming every time he moved.

And then, of course, Malfoy was late, even though he had agreed in his return owl that two-thirty was a perfectly good time for a meeting. Harry was already busy enduring the stares of several restaurant patrons because he sat alone at a table and because, he assumed, his ordinary clothing and his tangled black hair weren't fancy enough.

The fuming was starting to win out over the wincing. Ten more minutes, Harry thought, and then he was standing up and walking out of here like a-

_A jilted lover?_

_ No, _not _like that, _Harry decided, very coldly and very patiently, and looked up when footsteps sounded in front of him.

Malfoy was walking towards him, in pale robes that of course matched everything in the place (and made him look more than a little like a ghost, but Harry doubted he would care about that). He wore a white flower in his fucking hair, even, which he took out with one smooth motion and placed on the table in front of Harry. Harry picked it up and held it. He had thought of tearing it up, petal by petal, and throwing it away, but, well. He hadn't.

Malfoy sat down in the chair across from him and smiled at the woman in glistening silver robes who immediately hastened towards them. He said something in flawless-well, Harry didn't know what language it was, maybe Latin or Russian, but it sounded as though he could speak it without a trace of an accent. The woman bowed her pale head back, replied in the same language, and waved her wand. Silver plates laden with fresh fruit and fresh meat appeared in front of them.

That was one reason Malfoy had chosen the place, Harry reckoned. If they couldn't do anything else with their hands, at least they could eat. He reached for the plate, only to have it skitter away across the table.

Because he would scream if he opened his mouth, Harry folded his hands in his lap and looked patiently at Malfoy, who was smiling at him with half-shut eyes.

"Like this, Harry," he murmured, and picked up a slice of peeled orange that glimmered in front of him as if it was made of jewels. He held it out towards Harry's mouth.

Harry felt his jaw lock. He didn't _want _to do this. Once again, he hadn't planned for this negotiation with Malfoy to go this way, but he knew that he didn't want it going any way that _resembled _this, not in the slightest.

But what were his alternatives? Malfoy sat there with his eyes glowing and sparking at Harry, much like the fruit, and the slice dangling in his fingers, also glowing. Harry could sit there and look like a right prat by keeping his mouth shut, or he could get up and storm out of there. He was sure that _Malfoy _would sit still for as long as he had to, holding that damn orange until it melted in his fingers.

Glaring, Harry opened his mouth. Malfoy immediately and delicately placed the slice of fruit on his tongue. Harry clamped his teeth shut over it and swallowed. It didn't help that it was probably the sweetest thing he'd had in a long time, Honeydukes chocolate that he'd occasionally bought himself as a treat included.

_And when was the last time that you bought yourself chocolate, anyway? _He couldn't remember.

"There you go," Malfoy complimented him in a faint purr. "And very graceful you look doing it, too."

Harry clamped his lips down harder around the juice and used his teeth on his bottom lip. "You know why I've called you here?" he asked finally, sitting back in the chair and feeling his fingers itch to punch the smug smile off Malfoy's face.

"A negotiation in good faith, you called it." When Malfoy let his eyelids fall far enough, he looked rather like a cat contemplating a bird with a broken wing. Harry wondered if he should tell him, and then decided it would give him too much satisfaction if he said it right now. "And yet you left it up to me to choose the subject. Curious, that. Could it be that it always goes badly for you when you try to initiate the conversation?" He tilted his head to the side and added in a whisper that Harry honestly didn't think could be heard at the next table, "Or the sex."

Harry bit back the words he wanted to say again, and saw Malfoy frown. "I didn't mean you to stifle yourself around me," Malfoy murmured, leaning forwards. "If anything, the opposite."

Harry closed his eyes and tried to speak honestly again. It hadn't worked for him in the past, but neither had lying, and he was tired of the lying. "I want to find out what will make you back away from me and also from anyone else who takes your case. I don't want someone else to suffer for my poor decisions."

Silence. Absolute silence. Harry found himself thinking that Malfoy might have stood up and walked away from the table-at least until he opened his eyes and found Malfoy leaning forwards, his fingers splayed out across the tabletop and white-knuckled. Harry almost laughed. He did things he thought would be proactive and he couldn't even irritate Malfoy, never mind anything else. And he said something simple and silly and Malfoy reacted like _this_.

Merry, light-hearted for no reason except with the giddiness that he had sometimes found on the other side of absolute despair, he reached down and picked up a thin, shining slice of meat from the further plate, holding it out towards Malfoy with his fingers. "Open up," he added, when Malfoy continued to keep his mouth stubbornly shut. "What's the matter? Don't you like beef?" He thought it was beef, from the faint pink color, although to be fair, it was nearly translucent and he didn't know for certain.

Malfoy shut his eyes, and a faint wave of color touched his cheeks. Then he parted his lips, murmured something that sounded like, "Forgive me," and stuck out his tongue to lap at Harry's fingers and the food.

Harry ignored the wet sensation and let go of the meat only when he was sure that Malfoy had it firmly in his jaws. He was sure that the rest of the crowd in the Three Blossoms was staring at them, but he didn't care. He kept his eyes on Malfoy's face. If he did that, it was surprisingly easy to ignore the thought of those others.

"Forgive me," Malfoy repeated, after closing his mouth and opening his eyes, and then looking as if he might have preferred to do that in reverse order. "I never meant to stifle you. I saw you dying, and wanted to wake you up."

"Yes, well, you don't _usually _want to do _that _with dead people," Harry said, and leaned back, and laughed aloud. Now he _knew _the people in the other chairs were staring. Well, let them. "I should know."

Malfoy narrowed his eyes. "I never knew how many of the rumors about you and the Deathly Hallows were true, you know."

Harry only shook his head. He might lose his job, he might fall victim to Malfoy and lose his reputation, but he refused to talk more about the Hallows. That was a different and special kind of dangerous than anything he and Malfoy had done so far.

"So this is it," he said. "I wanted to capture you because you were a thief and good at making everyone think you weren't one. And because I felt disappointed that you hadn't done more with your life after the war, I admit it. And you want to prove that you aren't a coward, and you want me, and you want to wake me up, and you thought I was dying. Nothing makes _sense, _Malfoy, including what you want us to do together. That's the end of it. That's it. I want to get off the case, since I'm in danger of losing my job as it is, and I don't want you to attack other Aurors. So. How do we go about it?"

Malfoy's face and eyes drained of both color and life, and he sat there, looking at Harry. Then he picked up a slice of something bright pink and yellow, perhaps peach, and offered it. Harry ate it, while looking steadily at him all the while.

It was strange, he thought, when some time had passed and Malfoy hadn't said anything. He had thought Malfoy more at home with truth than he was, but now that he was confronted with the truth of what Harry wanted, he didn't seem to know what to do with it.

"I want to be with you," Malfoy whispered at last. "I wanted you to leave the Ministry of your own free will, and come to me. I wanted to steal your heart."

_So there it was, _Harry thought, and let the truth flutter to a death between them like an autumn leaf. He began to breathe more easily at once, deeper breaths that also seemed to let more air into his lungs. He didn't understand that, but, well, perhaps he wasn't required to understand.

"That's not going to happen," he said. "It wasn't going to happen from the time that you destroyed Flowing's evidence. Anything you do to me, I can forgive, or tell myself that I deserve it anyway for being stupid. But not her. Not what you did to her."

"That was only to get your attention," Malfoy whispered. "I didn't mean anything by it. It wasn't really meant to hurt her."

"But it did," Harry said, standing up. "Emotionally and her standing in the Department. What will it take to make you let me go and not hurt anyone else?"

Malfoy looked up at him and shook his head wordlessly.

_Nothing, _Harry thought. _There is no price._

He half-inclined his head to Malfoy. "All right, then," he said, and walked away, not turning a hair when the woman in the silver robe tried to edge in front of him. He knew he hadn't left anything behind.

"Harry!" Malfoy yelled after him, with a real and dangerous tone in his voice.

Harry still didn't look back. He was going to do what he should have done in the first place, when his obsession with Malfoy started getting personal and he realized how far Malfoy would go to attract his attention. He was going to confess everything to Thorin, show him what had happened and make a final attempt to warn him how crooked and twisted Malfoy was. Then no one could say that he hadn't done his duty.

And then he was going to leave the Aurors.

_It's time, _he thought, as he stepped outside the Three Blossoms and squinted at the sky, from which a light rain was falling. _I can't be professional, I can't be objective, and I need to do something else about Malfoy, if he won't negotiate._

He thought he heard running footsteps behind him, but it could as easily be the light patter of the raindrops, and in any case, he saw nothing for certain before he Apparated.


	13. Finding Oneself

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Thirteen—Finding Oneself_

A conversation with Thorin wouldn't help anything, Harry had decided after he thought about it for a little while. Thorin would only interrupt him, or pretend to believe him for as long as it took him to get Harry out of his office. It had to be paperwork or nothing.

So Harry had written a letter in which he laid out everything Malfoy had done and what he had confessed to Harry at last, and then made multiple copies of it, so that Thorin could see he'd done so. Two copies would end up on Thorin's desk, because he liked things that way. One would go to his secretary, and one to the Head of the Hit Wizards, because they might have to watch out for Malfoy next, and one to the Head of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement. With luck, Malfoy wouldn't be paying _all _of them to ignore the law, and someone else might finally realize how dangerous he was and do something about it.

And now…

Harry had wondered, at first, how to phrase his resignation letter, whether it should be like some of the ones he'd seen in the past or unique or even as bland as he would make a Ministry memo. That was the sort of thing Thorin would seize on eagerly.

But he found that he had done his limit of Thorin-pleasing when he wrote the letter about Malfoy. So he simply wrote, _I feel that I am no longer professional enough to be an Auror, _and signed his name, and made multiple copies of that as well, before he sealed it into a number of envelopes.

Something hit his window. Harry turned and glanced up, his hand falling to his wand. He had renewed his wards after Malfoy broke into his home, but for all he knew, the bastard had just broken through them again.

No. Instead there was an owl there, a silvery creature that reminded Harry painfully of Hedwig, although the color on the tips of her feathers was brown rather than black. She battered and battered the glass, hooting impatiently when she saw him looking at her.

Harry wondered if the message could be from someone else, but then he glanced at the elaborate silver curlicue of the scroll around her leg, and snorted. No. This was from Malfoy, all right. And Harry didn't see what he could add to the words they had already exchanged in the Three Blossoms earlier.

He Flooed instead of Apparating as he'd planned, so as not to open the door and give the owl a chance to get in. He ignored the way the hooting spiraled up into frantic. He was sorry, but she would just have to wait, or follow him to the Ministry.

He arrived through one of the fireplaces in the Atrium with a bang that made a lot of people turn to stare at him. Harry grimaced, shook out the foot that he'd caught on the edge of the hearth, and shrugged at the people watching him the same way he'd shrugged at the owl, before turning and making his way towards the lifts. He never Flooed gracefully at the best of times, and it mattered even less than usual now, considering how stupid he'd been and that he was leaving his job forever.

_And then what?_

_Then I sort myself out, that's right, _Harry answered himself, and was glad that no one else was in the lift he took, because he didn't know what the expression on his face looked like at the moment.

* * *

"Well. It all seems to be in order."

Harry still didn't know whether Thorin was actually in Malfoy's pay or simply not inclined to view him as a threat, but he knew, as he watched the man's bright smile and the way his fingers lingered on the parchment of the letters, that he had never liked him less than he did in that moment. Thorin really _did _care more about paper than people. No wonder he had been so unkind to Flowing the other day, after Malfoy's spell destroyed her records.

"Can I go now, sir?" he asked.

Thorin looked up at him, and then chuckled and waved his hand. "No need to call me _sir, _really, now that you're not an Auror anymore," he said. "But yes, you can."

Harry paused as he stood up, his hand still bracing his weight on the back of his chair. He hadn't thought about that. He'd thought about what a mess he'd made of things, and how he would break the news to Ron, and whether or not his friends would approve of this gesture or try to persuade him to take his job back.

But he hadn't thought about being free of Thorin and Ministry expectations for the first time in years.

Instead of walking out the door, he turned around again. Thorin was admiring the straight edges of the pile in front of him, and took a moment to look up. His face was as close to benevolent as it ever got.

"A final favor, Potter?" he asked. Harry wondered if it was his imagination that Thorin took particular pleasure in not using his old title, but he didn't think so.

"I think you're the worst Head Auror that we could have," Harry said conversationally, "especially in years like this, after the war."

Thorin's face went white, and he stared at Harry in bewilderment, one hand creeping out as though he would snatch up something and use it as a weapon. But his desk was buried under nothing but paper. Harry thought even his wand might be somewhere at the bottom of one of the stacks.

"What are you talking about, Potter?" Thorin was whispering, his eyes narrowed. "Be _very _careful what you say to me. There are other candidates you know nothing about, and you know that the Ministry's public reputation suffered during the war, as many of the Aurors as served You-Know-Who and his puppets. We have to—"

"Say his bloody name," Harry hissed, taking a step forwards. "He's years and _years _dead, and I know damn well you would be creeping around in fear every day of your life if you _really _didn't think so! Instead, you give him silly titles and tremble out of reflex, because you never bloody _think!_ Say his name!"

Thorin stood up, but kept himself carefully behind the desk, Harry noted, instead of moving out to confront him as Harry would have liked. "That is not the only standard of bravery, Potter, as you should well know," he said. "You were not the _only _one who displayed courage during the war. And those who call him You-Know-Who have done more than you have to rebuild the world since then!"

"It's a simple test," Harry said relentlessly. "And if I'm not an Auror, if I'm the inconvenience and the burden that some people have told me I am since the war because I don't understand the way the world really works, then I don't have to care about the bloody standards that the rest of the world employs. I can care about just mine, and it'll still be _fine._ Say his bloody name!"

Thorin's hand dropped down to his wand. Harry drew his instantly, and held it to Thorin's chest. He realized that he was trembling with excitement, and tried to stop, but it was hard.

"You're mad," Thorin whispered.

"Yes, that's the kind of thing that you like," Harry said, and finally managed to bring his tremors under control. He wasn't actually going to curse Thorin, no matter how tempting it seemed. "To be able to accuse someone of being mad and out of control, so that you don't have to listen to what they're telling you." He moved backwards and sneered at Thorin, who looked like he wanted to wet his trousers in response. "Well, I'm going to prove that I can walk away after all. Knowing you're a coward, someone obsessed with the reports that people make instead of making sure those people are doing the right thing," he added, and turned his back.

Thorin tried to curse him, a flash of red light Harry saw from the corner of his eye that could have been a _Stupefy._ He lifted a Shield Charm without even thinking about it, and didn't stay to smile in satisfaction at the thump from behind him, that proved the spell had reacted on Thorin and Stunned him. He kept walking, ahead and down the corridor, and so to the lifts, and so out of the Ministry.

On the way down, he leaned against the back of the lift and sighed. Adrenaline had left him shaky.

So that was _it._ He hadn't realized how long he had been itching to speak to Thorin like that, how long he'd been yearning to yell at him that his emphasis on procedure let more criminals go free to kidnap or curse or kill someone again.

Of course, it didn't solve anything. Malfoy could still go on stealing and training other people in the Dark Arts, and he would probably still escape justice, because Thorin would hesitate to assign anyone else to the case.

Harry couldn't change anything there. But then again, he didn't think he could have changed anything if he'd stayed with the Department, either. Hermione was right; Thorin wouldn't accept any proof. It was worth it if Harry could ease his own feelings and then go his way, no longer bound to the Department of Magical Law Enforcement in any way whatsoever.

Harry closed his eyes, tilted his head back, and gave himself up to silent enjoyment of the future that he hoped he had in front of him.

* * *

He forgot and Apparated home instead of Flooing, and the first thing that happened as he came out of his Apparition was the owl who had tried so hard to corner him earlier swooping down at him. Harry sighed and ignored the way that her talons pricked at him as she landed on his arm; at least those hurt less than an owl _bite, _and he hadn't been seriously injured by their claws at any time since he'd been in the wizarding world.

The silver scroll immediately unfolded itself and hung in the air in front of Harry when he reached over to untie it, speaking in a low, sweet voice like a reverse Howler. Harry assumed the owl would fly away the instant her message was delivered, but she sat there, looking alert and interested. He assumed that Malfoy had probably told her to wait for a response.

_"What am I supposed to think, Harry? I thought you were at the stage where you could accept that I wanted you, but it seems you aren't. You're still thinking in terms of other people, as though I hurt them because I hated them. I didn't. They're incidental. You were the only one who mattered to me when I sent that magical owl to the Ministry._"

Harry rolled his eyes as Malfoy's voice stopped speaking and the scroll tumbled to the ground. If he had bothered answering, he could have said that Malfoy not seeing anything wrong with this made it _worse,_ rather than more harmless, but he was frankly tired of the whole affair.

Malfoy wouldn't change. He wouldn't understand why he should even if Harry asked him to. And Harry had made enough violent changes in his life lately. He wanted to relax and think about what he should do next, not embark on some mad relationship with Malfoy that would only end up in flames anyway.

"No message," he told the owl.

She stared at him incredulously. Harry just waited, his arm extended stiffly in front of him, for her to take the hint and fly off. She crouched down for a moment as if she would shit on him, but then took off instead, soaring into the sky above Harry's head with smooth, rapid wingbeats. Harry had the impression that she would have shaken her tail at him if she could have.

Harry watched her depart for a moment, and then went back into the house.

* * *

"Who am I supposed to work with _now_?"

Harry winced and leaned back in his seat. Ron's whinging made him feel the worst about the whole affair, far worse than he had when he was contemplating what Auror would have to take Malfoy's case next. But he was sure that this was still for the best.

"I wasn't much good to you," he reminded Ron quietly. "Obsessed with Malfoy, neglecting evidence and interviews that we were supposed to do on the other cases. Did I ever come back to Linton after I'd got what I wanted from her? I stole evidence, too, those letters that weren't supposed to leave the Ministry. I could get you in trouble. And if I'm to the point where I'll have sex with Malfoy for no discernible reason, then I'm to the point that you need a new partner."

Ron considered him for a second with his head on his side, and then sniffed and reached for the platter of cheese and fruit that he'd only set down in the middle of the table a few minutes ago. "I thought you said that you—had sex with him—" He had far more trouble with the words than Hermione did. "—because you thought he might sleep for a while and let you have a look around the place."

Harry nodded and swung his leg forwards far enough that it bumped into the bottom of the table. Hermione, who hadn't said much all evening, just ate and listened to him with a sharp intensity, gave him a hard glance. Harry grunted an apology and focused on Ron. "I did think that. It was still stupid. Why in the world would he bring me to a place where he'd left evidence lying around? Enchanted by me or not, he wasn't drunk or under the influence of a narcotic potion. I'd spent years studying him and trying to catch him, and I _still _underestimated him. That was stupid."

"Yeah, that's not like you." Ron's eyes were shadowed as he hesitated, then put down the piece of cheese he'd picked up without eating it. "But do you think that quitting the Ministry was any less stupid, Harry?"

"Yes," Harry returned, and saw Hermione nod from the corner of his eye. A little buoyed that he had her approval, he smiled fiercely at Ron. "I was trying to obey Thorin's stupid rules, and that isn't like me, either."

"The last few years, it is," Ron said, and nodded as though he had scored a point in Quidditch.

"But when did you ever know me to obey rules before that?" Harry rubbed his face and gave Ron a wry look. "I changed myself trying to fit in, and all it earned me was the enmity of rules-obsessed superiors who knew that I would never be _that _good. They sensed I was different from them, and they hated it. Either that, or Thorin disliked me personally. I never did figure out which motive applied there."

"I don't know that it matters," Hermione said quietly. "But you'll have all the time that you need to figure that out. As long as you're free now, that's what's important." She reached out and took Harry's hand, and he squeezed back, smiling at her.

He heard nothing from above, of course, because owls flew silently, and in any case, most of the owls that came to the glass house would be for Hermione, with her numerous important contacts in the Ministry, or for Ron, from his family. Harry didn't expect it at all when the silvery owl slid towards _him_, aiming something fairly large and round directly at his face.

He didn't have time to duck more than halfway, and by then, the owl had firmly lobbed the pie into his face, leaving it dripping with fine chocolate and cream. He reached up and flicked his wand to clear at least his eyes—he had the feeling, from the sensation of the cream against his skin, that it was going to cling and be hard to remove—and watched the owl wheeling up into the sky again, apparently aiming for the stars.

Hermione and Ron were sitting across the table with their mouths agape. Then Ron cleared his throat and said, "Hell, mate. What did you do to piss George off?"

"It was Malfoy, not George." Hermione flicked her wand, in turn, and a few more blobs of cream vanished, but the others stayed. Harry sighed and went to work cleaning himself with harsher charms, while Ron, blinking, helped with a few that would protect his skin while the other spells were at work. "Harry, what did you _say _to him in that negotiation?"

"I asked what his price would be for leaving other Aurors alone if I quit the case." Harry shook his head as the chocolate finally left his eyelashes and the fine web of silky cream on his cheeks melted. "Apparently he thinks leaving the Aurors is right up there with ignoring him."

"Then what are you going to _do _with him?" Ron asked, with an undercurrent to his voice that Harry recognized. Ron was thinking about ways that he could defend Harry from anything else nefarious that Malfoy did.

Harry smiled and stuck the finger with the last drop of cream in his mouth, so he could savor the taste. It was perfectly cool, and ordinary, despite the way Hermione gasped in warning.

"Go on ignoring him," he said, lowering the finger, "and leave it up to him to realize that there's nothing binding us to each other the way we are. I've already told him and he won't believe me, so it's up to him to think of it on his own."


	14. Different Views

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Fourteen—Different Views_

"I'm sorry, Mr. Potter, you want to do _what_?"

Harry smiled cheerfully at the librarian in front of him and put down the few Sickles that he owed as a donation because he'd never been to this library before. While the library was technically free, the donations were suggested from everyone who could afford them, to make sure the library had extra money to buy new books with. "Look at the success stories you've gathered over the years," he said. "I saw it advertised in the _Prophet _the other day. You've made a special effort to get stories of the war together, right? Documentation of the trials after it, and reports from eyewitnesses who were in the Ministry doing it, and memos from Aurors when the Ministry would release them, and interviews with everyone you could find?"

The librarian blinked at him for a long time. She was red-haired, like Ginny, but she had her hair pulled back in the kind of severe style that Ginny didn't like, and something of the pallor Hermione got when she'd spent a long time among books indoors. "Er," she said at last. "Yes, of course. The Retrieval of the Lost project. But, Mr. Potter, you were _in _the war. Why would you need to look at it?"

Harry laughed and pushed the Sickles across the desk to her. "Because just being in the war doesn't mean that I know or understand everything that happened," he said. "You might have experienced that yourself. Do you know everything about the library, just because you work here? Don't you find that the knowledge overwhelms you sometimes?"

"I—yes." Now the librarian seemed flustered around him for the reasons most people were. She picked up the Sickles, which sparkled and clinked between her fingers. "I understand, Mr. Potter. I just didn't think you were at the point in your life when you needed to look back and find a new perspective yet." She glanced up and smiled timidly at him.

"I need a new perspective on everything," Harry said firmly. He looked around the library, which opened back from the front door in seemingly endless shelves. A staircase on the far wall led up to the first floor, where he knew still more books were kept, along with older scrolls and ledgers and private collections donated by older pure-bloods anxious to make good with the new world. "This is the way I should go, right?"

* * *

After she had corrected him—the collection was actually on the ground floor, in a pleasant room with large windows that let in carefully controlled sunlight that never touched the shelves of material—the librarian went away, still looking a bit dazed, and Harry sat down and began to look through it.

The Death Eater trial documentation was the largest group. Newspaper articles, minutes, memos, reports, even diary entries from the Wizengamot members who had died since then and left orders to give their private papers to the library, Harry flicked through them all, looking patiently for some mention of the Malfoy name.

He found it in an article under a photograph that showed Malfoy—Draco—practically trying to duck out of the frame, his hands shielding his face. Harry stared at it, then shook his head. Strange, to think of the man he was now behaving like that.

The article said a few uninteresting things in the first few paragraphs about the crimes that Malfoy had been judged for, notably being part of the Death Eaters, and who had presided at his trial. Harry skipped down, looking for what he knew was there, but which he couldn't remember the exact wording of.

Then he saw his own name, and on the second page found the nervous-looking photograph of him in the dress robes he'd worn to the Yule Ball, the only pair he'd owned, that the _Prophet _had insisted on sneaking in with everything else.

_Ah. Yes._

""…do hope that Mr. Malfoy leads a better life after this," the Chosen One was quoted as saying shortly after the trial. "I hope that he can recover from the expectations that almost devastated him, the expectations of other people most of all. He isn't a bad bloke, you know. It was trying to please others that got him into trouble." The Savior of Us All paused to push his fringe back from his forehead to show the scar that he wears as a reminder, looking calm and wise. "Maybe he ought to concentrate on pleasing himself.""

That was the quotation of what he had said, all right, though the reporter's interpolations still made Harry roll his eyes. He put the paper down in front of him and leaned back thoughtfully to look at it, and at the pictures again. He didn't seem so different from Malfoy when he considered the way that they both wanted to duck out of sight. Malfoy was just the only one who'd acted on his desires.

_As he did when he approached me._

Harry sighed and rubbed the back of his neck. He hadn't been in the library long, had barely looked at anything, and already his neck and back ached as though he had spent hours crouching over papers. That was a life of scholarship for you, he supposed, unless you were like Hermione, whose bubbling enthusiasm kept her alive all through it.

Was it any _wonder _that Malfoy might have looked at those words and thought Harry was practically giving him his blessing to go out and live a life of crime? Since that seemed to be what pleased him.

Harry paused, and flicked a few other papers aside, looking for the more recent ones that followed up on the stories of Death Eaters after the war, usually on the anniversary of the trials or Voldemort's defeat. Yes, there were pictures of Malfoy transforming himself into the sleek philanthropist, appearing at Ministry functions of all kinds, balls, openings of places like this library, so pleased with himself that his smile practically wrote it across the air in lights.

And in one…

Harry leaned down and stared. He didn't remember the particular Ministry party that the photograph appeared to cover; there had been so many he'd attended over the years to appease Thorin and his ilk that they blurred together into his mind into one large shifting, colored mass of poor lighting and bad food. But no, here it was, his face in a corner behind Malfoy's shoulder as Malfoy laughed and talked and turned his head between the flunkies who stood on either side of him.

And the expression on Harry's face was—enlightening. He glared at Malfoy with the same expression that he might regard a plate of poisoned but delicious food.

Harry sat back and looked up at the walls, wondering if they had witnessed Malfoy coming here to stare at those documents and confirm that it wasn't his imagination.

_No wonder that he thought he had some grounds to pursue me, if he saw things like this._

Of course, Harry had no proof that he'd done that. But it might explain some things, as it explained some things to Harry himself.

Flipping through more documents revealed no others that had him and Malfoy in close proximity, and so Harry finally put them back in their proper places and left again, with another smile at the nervous librarian. His mind dazzled and danced and skipped past the new possibilities as he left the building and stood for a moment on the front steps, looking around the new and prosperous section of Knowing Alley that it was located in.

_I've been obsessed with him for a longer time than I thought. Of course, even then I probably thought he was a thief and wanted to prove it, but why did I _care _so much? I've never cared that much about anyone else Ron and I hunted._

To the detriment of the case, sometimes, Harry knew, as he began to walk slowly through the alley to the Apparition point. He had wanted to prove a link to Malfoy with some of the illegal Potions brewers they found even when there wasn't one, and that had caused him to overlook evidence that Ron had later been the one to put to good use.

Sometimes he had told himself that it hadn't mattered, because the things he was good at, like the chase and the capture, were enough to make him and Ron a powerful team anyway, and Ron was the one who was good at strategy. But thinking back over it now, his face burned.

_No. Quitting was the right decision. I wasn't focusing on my job, I was acting unprofessional, I was putting Ron down and in danger and making him do a lot of the work, and I couldn't have given the case to someone else because Malfoy would just have tormented whatever Auror decided to take it on. This is the best way._

Of course, that still left open the question of what he would do now that he'd quit. But at least he was still alive, and Ron was still alive, to have the option.

"Potter."

Harry looked up, and found himself jolting to a halt. Malfoy stood a few feet from him, at almost the intersection where Knowing joined Diagon, and was staring at him with a face as flushed as Harry's own and eyes that burned like fireworks.

Harry made sure he had quick access to his wand, although he knew Malfoy wouldn't have confronted him here in public if he intended to do anything _too _mad. Even this early in the morning, there were witnesses around, a steady stream of people on their way to the library and wizards who wanted to do early-morning shopping. "Malfoy," he said, in a tone that he tried to strip of every emotion. He'd let Malfoy have too much of him already.

"I have to talk to you." Malfoy took a single long stride that brought them considerably closer.

Harry thought of several possible responses, from _Well, I don't have to talk to _you to _Sorry, I'm busy this morning. _In the end, though, he was curious as to what Malfoy would say to justify himself.

And maybe what he, Harry, would say in response. He was a much greater mystery to himself than he had ever realized.

"Somewhere more private than this, I assume?" Harry flipped his hand at the chaos that surrounded them, and had the satisfaction of seeing Malfoy half-rear back and stare at him.

"You're coming," he said.

Harry bared his teeth, thinking of the night that he had made Malfoy do that. "Not yet," he said. "I might as well spot the innuendo before you do."

That got him such a long and level stare that Harry believed for a moment Malfoy would take back the invitation. He didn't seem to like or understand this Harry who challenged him. Hell, Harry barely understood himself.

But then Malfoy jerked his head and said, "Fine. This way," and led him out of Knowing Alley in the direction of Knockturn. Harry raised his eyebrows and followed, wondering if he should be worried about the stain on his reputation by going down that way. True, he was no longer an Auror, but the _Prophet _might still make much of it, and their spies—or people who would sell the story to them—seemed to be everywhere.

Well. Harry cared less about that than he did about talking to Malfoy, whatever it was.

* * *

Malfoy didn't lead him into Knockturn after all, but over to a robe shop that someone had started in Diagon Alley earlier that year, only to learn that fits of enthusiasm by themselves weren't enough to lure customers away from Madam Malkin's. He produced a thin white key, and the door opened under his hand. Harry didn't manage to muffle his snort, and Malfoy turned and gave him another of those piercing stares.

"You apparently own the title to this property legitimately," Harry murmured. "I'm shocked." He stopped and then added, "Of course, the key might be magical."

Malfoy only shook his head as though Harry's conclusions wearied him and then flung the door in front of him wide. Harry had a glimpse of dusty emptiness before Malfoy pushed him inside and shut the door behind them.

Harry immediately cast a _Lumos_, and ignored the way Malfoy jumped and flinched when he drew his wand. If they were about to fight, Harry wanted some glimpse of his surroundings and knowledge of where to move.

It looked as though the unfortunate robe shop owner had taken his stock with him when he moved out. There was nothing in the whole vast front room but a few chairs, a pile of wood next to the fireplace, and a wide table covered with a cauldron and vials of green crystals. Harry sniffed at them.

"Powdered Viridian Boar's eye," he murmured. "So this is where you make some of that Explosive Draught that you sell so readily."

"The people who buy it could use for knocking down inconvenient walls," Malfoy said. From the sound of his voice, he had circled behind Harry. Harry remained looking at the table. He wasn't about to show fear in front of Malfoy if he could help it. "I don't make them use it to blow up their enemies."

"But you know what it's likely to be used for," Harry said conversationally, keeping his face forwards. "Is that the way you operate, Malfoy? Lying in bed at night and making up excuses for what you know is perfectly likely to happen?"

There came a silent rushing noise. Harry dropped to his knees and rolled behind the table, and Malfoy stopped running. Probably didn't want to run into the table and knock his ingredients over, Harry thought, leaning his head against a leg and grinning despite himself. Viridian Boar's eye was _expensive._

He became aware of a looming thought in the back of his mind, about whether he ought to report Malfoy and his illegal ingredients to the Ministry.

In the end, Harry shook his head. The Ministry would only ignore the report even if he made it, or, at best, launch an investigation that would go nowhere because Malfoy would remove the evidence first. Harry was done doing things for the Aurors.

"Why must you be so _difficult_?" Malfoy hissed at him.

"Sorry that I don't roll over and play dead when other people want me to," Harry said, grinning madly up at the mostly invisible ceiling. Dangling cobwebs were the only thing he could see of it. "It's a habit, I reckon."

Malfoy snorted and stalked in a circle. Harry closed his eyes and listened to him doing it. The idiot was making too much noise for someone who hoped to sneak up on Harry. Which at least _suggested, _Harry thought, shifting and rolling over, that that wasn't what he intended to do.

What was, then?

"I brought you here because I wanted to talk to you," Malfoy said, his voice echoing loudly in the confined space. "But it proves itself impossible, as usual."

That caused something to twist in Harry's brain, like an explosion of silent white light behind his eyes. He wrenched himself out from under the table and stood, stalking towards Malfoy.

Malfoy didn't attack him at once, the way Harry had thought he might. He stood there, blinking, and so his head rocked on his neck when Harry dealt him the ringing slap on the jawbone that he wanted to give. Even then, Malfoy raised one hand and waved it ineffectively in front of him, as though he couldn't understand what had happened.

"You brought me here to talk to you, and then attacked me," Harry said flatly. "It doesn't matter how much I irritated you with that remark about the Potions ingredients, you were already circling behind me with your wand aimed at my back. In what realm of what world is that _talking_?"

Malfoy lifted a hand to the handprint blazoned bright on his cheek, and carried on staring. Harry waved his arms at him, too angry to do anything but stand there and yell, even if it would have been wiser to run out the door right now.

"You _idiot. _I went to the library this morning to look up what I said about you after the trial, and yeah, it was there. All the hopes about how you would live a better life, and deserved to do something for yourself. I acknowledge I've been obsessed with you for bloody _years_, and I would have lived a better or at least a more sensible life if I _knew it._

"But you haven't helped! What kind of gesture is sending a cream pie after me? And breaking in and hanging your photograph on my wall? I get it, you wanted my attention focused on you as long as I was an Auror, and you didn't know any other way to get it. But now I'm not an Auror and you're doing the same bloody shit. Maybe consider that it won't _work _now that I'm not obsessed with your crimes! What _else _can you do? What other tricks do you have up your sleeve? Or are you still a thief and that's all you're going to be, because you can't think of anything else to do, any other way to _relate _to me, now that I'm not an Auror?"

By the end, he was shouting hard enough and loudly enough to please even Ron, if he had been there and witnessing the conversation. Malfoy stood there with his eyes wide and the expression on his face stark. Harry stopped, panting, and decided to give him a chance to answer.

"You have five minutes to say something," he murmured, surprised at the calm tone he was able to call to his own voice. "Then I walk out that door, and next time, I think I'll just refuse to talk to you."

Malfoy closed his eyes and stood there. Harry faced him with his blood buzzing. He didn't know what he expected more, for Malfoy to make no response or for him to make a stupid one. Well, either way he was ready.

Or, not ready, he thought, as the moments passed and Malfoy stood there and Harry's buzz didn't diminish. He was so caught up in the moment and finally _confronting _what lay between them that he just had to hover there, caught between worlds, between times, one when Malfoy had made a move to finish off this whole bloody thing and one when he hadn't.

Finally, Malfoy began to whisper.

"I read what you said after the trial, and I read what you said after my father's trial, and I heard your defense of my mother. And it seemed to me that it was worth doing something other than hiding in the Manor after all, because there was someone out there who really did _believe _that we weren't worthless and I could do something about it. I could get my life back. There was someone who would appreciate what I did."

Harry stared at him. "I was your ideal audience," he said at last. "I was the one that you thought would be—what? Impressed, intrigued maybe," he went on, answering the question before Malfoy could. "Certainly caught."

Malfoy nodded, his head half-bowed. "I was sure that you would—see the motivation behind it sooner or later. I never expected you to stay in the Aurors, you know. I knew what they were going to become when I watched the Wizengamot speakers at our trials. More rules-obsessed than ever, trying to prove that nothing like the takeover that the Dark Lord did would ever happen to me again."

Harry frowned at him. "Even if I hadn't become an Auror, why would you think that I could approve of the Dark Arts?"

"Because I didn't think that you would stay the upright little Gryffindor you were, either." Malfoy's voice was full of smoke and ashes. "You thought I could become something more than what I was. You'd been through war, and fighting the Dark Lord, and _death_. How could someone stay the same after that? If I could change, you could." He raised his head and stared unwaveringly at Harry.

Harry held his eyes, and his voice was gentle as he answered, "Not that much."

Malfoy shook his head and turned away. Harry stood there in the dark room in front of him, and once again waited. But he had the feeling that Malfoy didn't intend to break the silence this time, that nothing would.

Unless he did it.

So he took a deep breath, and did.

"There's nothing I can give you, nothing that helps take away the sting that I've given you so far," he said. "But I can say that I know myself now, and for whatever reason, I've been equally obsessed with you. I think—I _think _that it happened because I was sure that you would change after the war, too, but not the way you did."

Malfoy's hair caught a small gleam of light it hadn't a moment before, the only thing that showed he had turned his head towards Harry and begun to listen.

Harry licked his lips and whispered, "And I think part of me was jealous that you got away with everything, that you could be the darling of the reporters and not act like you were sacrificing everything when it was so _hard _for me to be polite to them, and that you had the respect of the Ministry even though you were a criminal. I found a photograph where I was glaring at you at one of those parties. Why would I be doing that when I wasn't jealous of that kind of attention? Because—because I think you were showing me that it didn't matter, that you're right about the Ministry, that in spite of them saying that they focus on peace and justice it's not the kind of place I belong, and the world isn't the way I thought it was."

Malfoy's hair gleamed a little more, and one corner of his face became visible.

"That nothing I can do," Harry said, and his voice was dying despite himself, as he thought back to the way that Thorin had probably got right back up after that Stunner and gone right on, "will change things."

Malfoy just continued waiting.

"So I have to do something else." Harry drew a long, rattling breath, and shrugged. "I think you showed me the value of chaos. I'm not going to approve of what you do, but I can't be the kind of priggish Auror that I was trying to turn myself into, either. I don't know myself, but that means I know what I don't know. That means I can find out."

Malfoy faced him fully now, and said, "I don't know, having considered you my audience for so long, if I can deal with knowing that you're not watching."

"That's all right," Harry said, and showed him the ghost of a smile. "Having chased you and resented you for so long, I don't know that I can look away."

Malfoy's lips parted, and Harry nodded. "It can't be the way it has been," he said. "It can't be the way I envisioned. It'll have to be something else."

And he turned and left before he did something stupid, such as kissing Malfoy. It wasn't time for that yet.


	15. Doing His Duty

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Fifteen—Doing His Duty_

Harry opened one eye and sighed. By the sound of the tapping at his window, there was one persistent owl out there, and it wasn't about to go away.

He stood up, wrapped a robe around himself, and walked into the front room. Yesterday, after several intense hours of study, he'd finally managed to charm the photograph of Malfoy off his wall, and he'd wrapped it up in a layer of Muggle plastic so that he couldn't be distracted by the bloody winking. The colors that Malfoy had inflicted on his home were still the same, though. They seemed to have received more permanent application spells. Harry shook his head as he stared at them. There was a real chance that if he let them remain, he would get used to them, and—

The owl hammered on the window again. Harry started and crossed the space that remained, opening the window before he thought about whether the message it held might come from Malfoy.

As it turned out, it didn't. Harry raised his eyebrows as he noted the official Ministry seal and the size of the owl, its strength and powerful wings. He would usually never receive one of these, and he ran the possibilities over in his mind as he opened the letter. Had the Wizengamot discovered some new irregularity in the Death Eater trials' documentation? The last time he had got a letter like this, four years ago, that had been the cause.

No, he realized after he read a few paragraphs. No, instead the Ministry was summoning him to question him about the Stunning of Head Auror Thorin.

Harry opened his mouth. He thought he might scream at the owl, honestly, because it was there and it was the only one who could hear him.

Instead, he started to laugh.

The owl jumped at the first note of the sound, and then jumped further when Harry waved the arm it was sitting on around. It ended up fluttering to his mantle, from which it watched him with a parted beak and claws scraping up and down on the stone. That was as much as Harry saw, though, before he sagged forwards and continued laughing hard enough to hurt his stomach.

Of course. Of _course _this would be something that happened. Thorin couldn't leave well enough alone, and Harry no longer thought he was in Malfoy's pay, because Malfoy would know better than to use someone so _stupid _as an informant. What did Thorin think he was going to gain from this?

That made Harry stop laughing and think about it a little, because as stupid as Thorin was, he had smarter superiors. They wouldn't have started the investigation in the first place, no matter how much Thorin whinged, unless they thought they would gain something from it later. So. Think about it. Use those Auror instincts for what he was supposedly so famous. What made this worth the effort?

Humiliation, maybe. Harry had deliberately not paid attention to the _Prophet, _but he reckoned someone would have found out that he wasn't working for the Aurors anymore and gleefully started spinning a story. Maybe the Ministry just wanted to pay him back for the inevitable rumors.

Or maybe they had something else in mind. Maybe they _did _expect him to play the political game, to come in and be contrite and apologetic, so they could hire him back. That was even more likely. The Ministry was full of people who couldn't imagine someone quitting over a matter of principle, or even just pique. They would think that Harry had done this to get some kind of concession from them.

Harry paused, and grinned. Well. They would sit around on the small investigative committee they had called up to deal with this, and expect him to come in and play the high-handed bastard for a short time before giving in and agreeing to take his job back.

Why not _make _them think that, and do something else entirely?

After all, the chaos that Malfoy had introduced into Harry's life could do with some spreading around.

* * *

"Mr. Potter. Thank you for coming."

Harry smiled and shook the hand of Gabrielle Meadsome. She was one of the people in the Department of Magical Law Enforcement who played so many games, from so many different directions, that Harry was never sure whose side she was on, but he actually liked her. She never pretended to be anything other than what she was, and she was always gracious and polite at the same time. As she had explained it once to Harry, when they had been political opponents over one particular case, she never saw the point in making enemies. People who struggled against her could make good allies if she admired their ability to struggle instead of taking it personally.

She didn't emphasize his lack of an Auror title, either, which everyone else who had greeted him as he walked through the corridors had done. Harry nodded to her. "Where should I sit, Madam Meadsome?"

"Oh, take the chair in front of the desk," Meadsome said, and spun out one of her long-boned hands in its direction. Harry nodded and sat there. It looked as if it would be a smaller meeting than he had anticipated, with only three other chairs. Meadsome took the center one, fussing with the hem of her robe as she sat.

"Mr. Potter."

_There _was the sneering emphasis on his lack of title that Harry had got used to hearing as he came through the corridors. He looked up and forced a happy smile onto his face, because he knew that particular voice, and that expression would irritate him more than any other. "Mr. Thompson!" he said, his voice strong and hearty. "So nice to see you again!"

Thomas Thompson, Deputy Head of the Department, stiffened and walked warily to the chair on Meadsome's right, checking Harry from the corner of his eye all the while as though to ensure that he wouldn't get up and try to shake his hand. That left the woman who had come in behind him to stand and study Harry in silence.

Harry bowed stiffly back to her. Out of all the people in the room, this was the only one he thought would be dangerous: Jennifer Kendricks, Head of the Department.

She shared Thorin's opinion of Harry as an Auror who was dangerously undisciplined, but she was intelligent, and knew the ins and outs of the paperwork she filed instead of valuing it for itself, and knew how to use people as well as signatures. Harry sat still and let her observe him, and then smiled.

He didn't have to be afraid of her anymore, did he? What could she do to hurt him, other than spread rumors? The Ministry had no power to discipline someone who wasn't in its ranks, as long as they didn't actually break any laws. And with Meadsome on the committee who would make the decision, Harry thought his Pensieve memory would convince them, as it ought, that Thorin had Stunned himself more than anything.

He wasn't vulnerable. So he might as well have some fun.

"Head Kendricks," he said, with a nod to her, and then leaned back on his chair and looked around. "Do you have a Pensieve ready? I should have one if I'm going to put the memory in it to show you."

"We've decided that we won't need a Pensieve," Kendricks said, as she took the chair on Meadsome's left. She had given Meadsome a brief look, as though expecting her to yield the central one, but Meadsome smiled innocently back, and in the end, Kendricks turned her head away with her hair spilling down her neck and sniffed. "The trial should be short and easy. We have heard Head Auror Thorin's story. Why did you attack him?"

"He was the one who attacked me," Harry said easily. "He cast a Stunner at my back, and my Shield Charm reflected the spell back on him." He knew that he didn't imagine the way that Meadsome's lips quivered when she heard that.

"That's ridiculous," Kendricks said sharply, and then settled back and took the invisible reins of her self-control in hand again. "That does not match at all with the story we have heard from Head Auror Thorin."

Harry smiled at them, and let some of the ropes that he was always clutching to prevent a fall go. "I'm willing to take Veritaserum."

Meadsome sat up. Even Thompson's eyes widened. Harry knew why. The Ministry had wanted to get him under Veritaserum for a long time, to interrogate him about the war and what the limitations of his powers _really _were. Harry had always made sure that he took it, when he did, in carefully controlled situations where people would only ask him questions about the case. He wondered what the hell was going to happen to their questions this time.

Then he dismissed the worry. The point was that he wasn't afraid of anything they could ask him. And it was such _fun _to watch Kendricks's face turn different colors.

"We are not using Veritaserum, either," Kendricks said sharply. "Bringing it up, _Mr. _Potter, is a distraction, and—"

Meadsome raised her hand like a schoolgirl. Kendricks turned and glared at her, even as Meadsome said meekly, "I don't understand why we _aren't _using Veritaserum and a Pensieve, Head Kendricks. It would be for the best, to ascertain the truth, which, after all, we are here to do." Honeydukes chocolate wouldn't have melted in her mouth.

"I agree," Thompson said. "And I am glad that Mr. Potter is so willing and anxious to tell us the truth." He smiled at Harry, which was definitely the first time _that _had ever happened. Harry felt his stomach begin to hurt the way it had yesterday, this time from holding the laughter in rather than letting it out.

"There is nothing about this case that requires the use of _any _extraordinary measures." Kendricks was trying to hold onto her temper, Harry thought, and doing a miserable job. She stared back and forth between faces as though she could control what went on in their minds that way, and then turned back to Harry with the kind of immense dignity that had always made Umbridge look ridiculous. "Now. Mr. Potter."

"Head," Harry said, and grinned at her.

Kendricks closed her eyes for a moment as though she was praying for patience to continue, and then opened them and shook her head. "What you stated happened cannot have happened," she said. "Do you have a way to prove it to us by a non-magical means?"

"Such as telling the truth?" Harry could feel the grin simply overwhelming him. He let it. Kendricks had acted like a bully more than once, telling younger Aurors—at least, the ones Harry was aware of—that they had to obey every tiny rule of the Department or be sacked. He was going to take the chance to humiliate her while he could. "The way that you're convinced Thorin did?"

"It is _because _Head Auror Thorin told us the truth that we must cast doubt on your story, as much as it pains us to do so," Kendricks began.

"Oh, do let it go, Jennifer," Meadsome interrupted. "Anyone would think that you and Thorin had been lovers for years, the way you go on about him." She seemed not to notice the horrified stare that Kendricks gave her. "Mr. Potter, I'm more interested in why Thorin attempted to Stun you."

"I told him what I really thought of him," Harry said, and arranged his robes around himself in a way that would let him move quickly if he had to get off the chair and out of the room in a hurry. "I told him that he's the worst Head Auror we've had at least since the war, and that there's no reason he should have been chosen, and that there's no reason for me to stay here and obey him anymore."

Meadsome immediately sat up straight and assumed a pious expression. "Mr. Potter, would you say that Head Auror Thorin's attitude is a large part of the suffering you have endured in this Department?"

"_Suffering_?" said Kendricks, turning around to look at Meadsome as though the woman had literally stabbed her in the back. Meadsome smiled innocently and let the smile fade as she glanced back at Harry.

Glad of the help even if it was for her own private reasons, Harry inclined his head. "Yes. He trusts paperwork more than people, and he has insanely high standards of evidence for cases. I even thought that he might be bribed, at one point."

"By Malfoy?" interrupted Kendricks, before Meadsome could say anything. "Yes, Mr. Potter, we've heard all about your insane theories, but _really_. You're claiming that Mr. Malfoy is an international jewel thief among other things?"

Harry met her eyes and smiled at her. "I never claimed any such thing," he said. "Except in the private memos that I sent to Thorin. So you must have seen them, Head Kendricks, or he must have been allowed to submit them as evidence. I'm not allowed to do the same thing, though?"

Kendricks sat up straighter in her chair. "You have been allowed to speak, and your story is unconvincing."

"Only to _you_," Meadsome said. "And based on some of the things that I've heard you saying about our Mr. Potter before this, you wouldn't believe him if he said that he could walk on the floor."

"She _is _right about that, you know," Thompson said, to Harry's utter shock. He blinked at Thompson. The man blushed, but kept on. Perhaps there were things he believed in enough to stand up for them, after all. "I think you're being a bit unfair, Jennifer, not allowing him to submit magical evidence and not allowing him to submit documents. Thorin was allowed the latter, at least. Why not the former?"

"This is an investigation," Kendricks said, and apparently expected the words, or the glare with which she said them, to produce some effect.

They only made Meadsome chuckle and Harry grin. Thompson looked sterner. "Then we should conduct it like one, and not like a dummy trial," he said, and turned to Harry. "Mr. Potter, is there any evidence that you would like to offer?"

"I'd still like a Pensieve," Harry said. "That way, you could see the memories of my conversations with Thorin as well as my memory of the moment when I Stunned him."

"That sounds reasonable," Thompson began, nodding.

"Have you forgotten what we are here to do?" Kendricks turned around on her chair again, though part of the problem with her trying to intimidate Thompson was that there was a chair between them. Harry was starting to think that Meadsome had probably put herself there on purpose. "We are _here _to find out why Mr. Potter Stunned Head Auror Thorin, and what retribution he should pay."

"And to find out the first," Meadsome said in a drawl that was so like Malfoy's Harry smiled in spite of himself, "we have to talk to him about it, and allow him the right to express himself freely." She looked at Harry and tilted her head to the side with a slight smirk. "I must admit I have no interest in discovering the second."

Kendricks started to interrupt, but Meadsome had already Summoned a Pensieve that she sent floating towards Harry. He nodded his thanks and touched his wand to his temple, recalling the memories of his last conversation with Thorin and the one where he had complained about Thorin's reprimand of Auror Flowing.

He was _very _careful not to concentrate on the memories of the times they had talked about other aspects of the Malfoy case. There was letting out a little chaos into the Ministry and there was upending his entire life. No, thank you. Quitting the Ministry was supposed to _reduce _his stress.

When the memories were in the Pensieve, he floated the whole bowl over to the table, and Meadsome bent and plunged her head in immediately. Thompson followed her just a second later, which left Kendricks to strum her fingers on her wand and glare at Harry. "I hope you know what you've done," she hissed.

Harry smiled innocently at her.

Kendricks did some more glaring, and finally seemed to realize that she couldn't actually intimidate him. With one final disgusted shake, she lowered her head, too, and there were a few moments of silence. Harry drummed his foot on the floor and whistled slightly.

A movement by the door caught his attention. He looked over, wondering if it had been long enough that Kendricks's secretary had come to summon her to lunch.

Instead, he saw Malfoy standing there, his hand on the door. He wore dress robes, complete with a shimmering, gorgeous tie that made Harry certain it would be silken-soft. He was staring at the three officials with their heads buried, his own eyebrows raised, his mouth open in a faint gape.

Then he looked at Harry, and a smile that looked involuntary broke out over his face, much the same as the smiles that Harry had been producing throughout his trial. He stepped back and let the door fall shut.

That left Harry blinking. Malfoy hadn't come in to try and mess things up? Why was he here, then?

He had to look forwards again as Meadsome surfaced from the Pensieve, though. She nodded and looked Harry in the eye.

"A loss," she said. "While I can understand that you wanted to leave the Ministry, and why, you would have made a fine addition to our Diplomatic Corps."

"That is not funny even as a joke, Gabrielle," Kendricks said as she surfaced in turn, and shook her head as though to make sure that none of the memories were clinging to her hair. She stared at Harry. "Were it not that none of the memories show signs of tampering, Mr. Potter, I would certainly detain you on charges of perjury."

"And me not even sworn in," Harry said dryly.

"Things happened just as you said." Thompson looked pleased as he sat back in his chair, and Harry knew why. Things had gone according to procedure and there was a single, simple, clearcut answer; that was all that was really needed to make Thompson happy. "You are free to go as far as I am concerned, Mr. Potter."

"Thank you," Harry said, and looked at Kendricks.

She visibly ground her teeth for a moment, and then jerked her head down with her mouth working into a line of distaste. "If you _must, _Mr. Potter, then you must. I saw the memory along with everyone else. While I disagree that you had sufficient cause to say everything you have said, it is true that you did not mean to Stun Head Auror Thorin, and that is the crime we brought you here to investigate. You may go."

Harry bowed his head to her, and then stood and walked in the direction of the door where he had seen Malfoy, internally sighing in relief. Meadsome and Kednricks had already begun to argue behind him, but he would only form a small piece of their dispute with each other, he fervently hoped, not the whole thing.

"Harry?"

It took Harry a moment to recognize the soft voice that whispered his name after he slipped out of the interrogation room. He looked towards the alcove where it came from, and Malfoy stepped out of it. Harry had to physically grasp his own wrist so that he wouldn't reach out and touch Malfoy's tie.

_After years of suppressing my impulsive behavior, I reckon it _is _going to come out all at once, _he thought wryly.

"I'm fine," he said, since he reckoned that would be Malfoy's question. "They wanted to try me for Stunning Thorin, but I gave them my memories, and they _had _to admit that the spell bounced off my Shield Charm and hit him."

Malfoy smiled openly and nodded. "I was here in case you needed help," he said.

Harry stared at him for a moment. "I don't know what to say," he said. "How—how _could _that have helped, when what Thorin and I were arguing about was you? How did you hear about this, anyway?"

"I have my sources," Malfoy said, in a lofty tone, as though he hadn't just admitted to bribing someone in the Ministry. "And they mean that I can come to protect you, though I suppose you don't always need it." He studied Harry as though he was hoping to find some sign of neediness in his face after all.

Harry sighed. "But how could you help? That's what I don't get."

Malfoy leaned closer to him. Harry was still dimly aware of the arguing voices in the room behind him, which seemed to have risen into a row, and of footsteps in other parts of the Ministry, down different corridors, but he and Malfoy seemed alone, in an enchanted little bubble of silence.

"I have a reputation as a rather powerful philanthropist, interested in the doing of good works," Malfoy murmured. "It's not just a cover. I do provide aid to those in need, and it's something I can do for you, too, shielding you under the power of my character."

Harry blinked, and then blinked again. He hated to admit it, but given that he was almost the only one in the Ministry who knew, or believed, that Malfoy was actually a thief, it might just have worked.

"I—thank you," he said at last, because that was appropriate for Malfoy's good intentions, if not his past actions.

"You're in trouble because of me," Malfoy said, his eyes lingering on Harry's face as though he wanted to memorize the contours. "It was the least I could offer."

He was the one who turned and walked away this time, leaving Harry to blink at his back. In the end, he shook his head and turned down the corridor that led out of the Ministry, his step firm.

He'd had enough unleashing of anarchy for one day, both in his life and in other people's.


	16. Learning Desire

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_Chapter Sixteen—Learning Desire_

"And he really said that?" Hermione had a slice of orange in her hand, but she didn't seem to notice that the juice was dripping down her fingers, although ordinarily she would be sensitive about something like that. She just stared at Harry with her mouth open instead.

Harry finally reached across the table and tapped her wrist. Hermione jumped and then started eating again, her eyes never leaving his face.

"He really said that," Harry said, leaning back in his chair and sipping at the glass of pumpkin juice that he'd asked for. He'd spent yesterday reflecting on Malfoy and the strangeness of him showing up like that at the trial and offering to help, and then today he'd had to come over and tell it to _someone _before he exploded. Hermione had a stack of files in front of her, but she'd willingly pushed them aside to listen to him. "It makes me wonder—d'you suppose that he could just become a philanthropist like he's pretended to be all along? That would mean that he could still have a career and the adoration of the public. And he wouldn't even really have to change anything."

Hermione shook herself back to life, more deeply than Harry thought she had a while ago. "I suppose it could happen, yes," she said. "But I wouldn't count on it, Harry. You can't count on _anything _from him. You need to concentrate on your own life and how you're going to change it."

Harry nodded and swallowed more of the pumpkin juice. He felt young in some strange ways, which was why he'd asked for it. He had made mistakes in the past with Malfoy, but maybe he could wipe them out and start over again, even mistakes going as far back as when they'd both been eleven years old.

"It's going to involve Malfoy, though," he said. "In some capacity. That's the way it is. I'm too obsessed to walk away from him."

Hermione looked up with her eyes widening. "You don't mean that, Harry!"

Harry blinked at her and drank some more, swirling his tongue around to get the taste all through his mouth. "What do you mean? Of course I do."

Hermione sighed and put her scraps of orange peel neatly in a bowl in front of her. "You didn't realize for years that what you had was an obsession for something other than bringing him to justice," she said. "Now you do. The thing to do now is walk _away _from him. You're past the denial. But keeping the obsession alive is a way of chasing away rational thought and the adulthood that you need to achieve."

"Do you think up speeches like that in your sleep?" Harry asked, because he _had _to know.

Hermione flushed, but then looked at him and shook her head. "This is the way I talk," she said. "It just _is._ Harry. You know that obsession isn't healthy, and you can't construct anything real from it. Look at the way Voldemort was obsessed with you. It doomed him in the end. I don't want to see the same thing happen to you because of your infatuation with Malfoy. It's cost you your job and your peace of mind. That's enough. Cut off contact with him, or at best be polite and friendly to him when he comes after you."

"I can't," Harry said gently.

Hermione stared at him. "What? Of course you can." She flicked the orange peel shreds in the dish in front of her as if they were to blame. "There's no law saying that you need to stay with someone who's cast the kinds of spells on you that he did, and tormented you, and bothered you, and made you feel—"

"A lot of that was also me tormenting and bothering myself," Harry interrupted her. "If I'd understood myself better from the beginning, it never would have got this far."

Hermione faced him with arms folded. "Fine. Granted that. What makes you think that pursuing the obsession now is the best way of going about this?"

"Because trying to ignore it is just another form of denial," Harry said. "You don't escape from feeling sick because you understand what the disease is. I'm going to make sure that I understand it well enough not to succumb to it."

Hermione moved her lips for a minute, then gave him a small smile. "All right, I admit that you've stumped me. What does that _mean_?"

"It means," Harry said, draining the pumpkin juice and thumping the glass down in the middle of the table to the accompaniment of a wince and a murmur from Hermione, "that I find some way to integrate Draco bloody Malfoy into my life without letting him take it over completely. And I decide what that life is going to be."

* * *

Harry sat in the middle of his drawing room and stared into the fire, sipping idly now and then at the glass of brandy he held. It wasn't a drink that he had all the time, but that was part of the point. Get beyond the usual, the accustomed, and focus on the new.

Hermione didn't seem to think that would work, but Hermione wasn't here right now. Close his eyes. Relax. What were the things that he had _enjoyed _about Auror work? Besides the prospects that it offered him for hunting Malfoy down?

Definitely not the paperwork. Harry never wanted to work somewhere where he had to file things in triplicate again.

He celebrated the decision with another small swallow of brandy. Merlin, it didn't half make his throat burn. All right. That meant any job in the Ministry was out. Thorin's obsession or not, the Aurors still didn't do as much paperwork as some of the other divisions did.

It didn't tell him what he wanted to do, but it did close off one route, and left the field clear for others. What had he _enjoyed_?

The sense of usefulness. Although technically Harry reckoned he could take the rest of his life off and live on his parents' fortune if he was careful, he would get bored quickly. He needed to do something beyond himself, serve something larger than just his goal of getting up every day. The Ministry had been that ideal for him, until Malfoy opened his eyes. He had been able to tell himself he was doing good by putting criminals in cells, because at least it meant one less person to sell addictive potions or murder innocent wizards.

But he couldn't do that if the Ministry released every criminal he caught and wouldn't arrest the source of all the trouble…

Harry let the thoughts drift off, and shook his head. No, that was the kind of thinking that had got him into this mess in the first place, and caused him to waste several years of his life in the Ministry. What else could give him that sensation of usefulness?

And there was only really one answer, when he thought about it. If he'd been as passionate about house-elves as Hermione was, there would have been two, but he simply wasn't. He'd known Dobby well and loved him, and Kreacher and Winky were good in their own ways, but he didn't know whether it would be a good thing for the rest of them if he freed them, and that meant he couldn't get involved.

_Not hurting other people. That's another requirement. I might get people upset, but doing them damage is out of the question, unless they try to hurt me or someone else first._

Harry swirled the brandy around on his tongue, wondered idly what Malfoy would say was the proper way to enjoy it, and then turned his mind back to the problem.

Yes. He wanted to help heal the rift between Muggleborns and pure-bloods. It was the big gaping wound in their world that had never gone away. It wasn't as bad as it had been during the war, but that wasn't saying much.

Harry smiled grimly. In fact, not saying much was precisely the problem. Everyone pretended everything was fine, references to blood politics in the papers were few, and people sought for some other explanation when a pure-blood got away with the same crimes that would see a Muggleborn in Azkaban for at least a few months. The tension had sunk under the surface. For a lot of people who had lived through the days of pure-bloods accusing Muggleborns of stealing wands—like Umbridge had—that was enough.

But Harry knew the simmer was still there, and that meant another Voldemort could come along and exploit it. He had fought the war to get Voldemort to stop hunting him, but he had only been able to do that because his Muggleborn mother had sacrificed her life for him, and she had only died in the first place because of Voldemort's determination to kill the prophecy child who could stop him, and he had only wanted to kill Harry in the first place because his parents defied him, and Lily and James had only fought because Voldemort's plan to kill all the Muggleborns and put the pure-bloods in control was frankly insane.

So. Everything was all tangled and tied together, the way he and Malfoy were. Nothing could be separated.

_It'll piss Malfoy off something fierce, _Harry thought, as he tipped the last of his brandy down his throat.

Then he grinned. _I knew there was something else I liked about this plan._

* * *

"O-of course, Mr. Potter, if you want to. But what exactly do you _want _to see?"

Harry smiled. He thought Miss Mulligans, the primary school teacher in Ottery St. Catchpole whom he'd contacted, was a breath away from calling him "Mr. Chosen One," but she had the wit to ask a good question. And she stood, shivering a little in her bland grey robes, in front of the door of the school, as if to prove that she would let anything happen before she'd let him go in and disrupt the children's learning for no reason.

"I want to see what they're learning," he said quietly. "Hear it. I know that lots of different magical children come to Hogwarts with lots of different educational backgrounds." Miss Mulligans seemed to relax a little, and Harry nodded. He was proud of that particular phrase. It sounded like something an adult would have said. "Some of them are taught at home by their parents, and some by other relatives, and some in the primary schools, and some not at all. I know what it's like to come in with no education in magic at all, and I can't question every single set of parents, but I can look at the schools."

Miss Mulligans nodded, then paused. Her chin came out, and she moved her wand into sight, out from a fold in her robes. "To what purpose?"

"I want to see how hard it would be to integrate Muggleborn children into them," Harry said. "Or children whose magic is too weak to attend Hogwarts but who can learn a few simple spells. If necessary, I hope they could come here, and other places like it. Or I could found a school myself."

Miss Mulligans's prim, sensible mouth fell a little open that time. "But, Mr. Potter, that's not _done!_" she exclaimed. "Bringing in Muggleborn children would mean telling their parents about magic _years _ahead of time, and the poor children who can barely manage household charms would feel so inferior next to some of our students!"

"Keeping them apart doesn't work either," Harry said, gently but insistently. "It just makes the children who do learn magic feel superior to the ones who don't." He thought of Malfoy at eleven, so sure that Harry would know what Quidditch was and the Houses were, so sure that he was better than everyone, like Hermione, who came in without years of knowledge behind them. Hermione had worked to make herself a part of wizarding culture; Ron was effortlessly a part of it; and Harry…

Harry grimaced and pushed the question away for later consideration. _I don't know that I ever had a chance to be a normal part of anything, but I don't want to pity myself._

"Sometimes," Miss Mulligans said, standing up straight and folding her arms in front of her as if she thought they would form an impenetrable barrier that way, "one must maintain a sense of superiority and tradition in order to get anything done."

Harry raised his eyebrows and came back from his inner thoughts to attend to the conversation that he'd started. "What is being done here?" he asked. "_Think _about it. Whose purposes does it serve to have pure-blood or half-blood children trained in their magic, and Muggleborn children not trained at all, and scrambling to catch up?"

Miss Mulligans looked a little uncertain, but then gave him a conspiratorial smile. "Come, Mr. Potter, you can't make me think that you believe in that myth about the inferior intellectual capacities of Muggleborns! Everyone knows how smart your Muggleborn friend is."

"I don't believe in any such thing," Harry said calmly. "What I do believe in is a disadvantage handed to a bunch of people for no good reason, and although some of them can overcome that disadvantage, there's no reason it should exist. Consider what my friend could have done if she'd been able to take some of the things she studied for granted, if she hadn't spent hours trying to learn and understand the cultural context before she could even grasp the importance of concepts like the Statute of Secrecy."

"It can't be done," Miss Mulligans said.

"Not by an ordinary person, maybe not," Harry said, and smiled at her. "But the Boy-Who-Lived has a lot of political clout. I think I ought to start using it for something." He gestured to the school behind her. "Can I have a look?"

For a long moment, he thought she would continue to refuse, but in the end, she dropped her arms and stepped to the side so that he could get around her, giving him a glare all the while. "You can't change people's natures," she whispered. "And the way that we educate children is a part of human _nature_."

Harry ignored that ridiculous statement, and walked into the school. He had a lot to learn, and maybe everything he wanted to do wouldn't be possible. But staying away from things that made people uncomfortable wasn't a skill that had ever come naturally to him.

As Hermione said, if you were making the _right _people uncomfortable, then you were doing the right thing.

* * *

"Harry."

And there was Malfoy, sitting in the chair in front of his fireplace, standing up as Harry came in through the front door. Harry stood a moment with his hand clenching around his wand and his mouth opening in a snarl. Malfoy would probably never know how close he had come to dying in that moment.

Harry exhaled at last and lifted his hand. "Malfoy," he said, crossing over towards his fireplace and not looking towards Malfoy, who he knew would have his hand extended. "Determined to show me that you can still break through my wards?"

There was a long pause, and then Malfoy said, "Fuck, yes, you would interpret it that way, wouldn't you? I'm sorry. The only thing I was thinking about was showing you that I was serious and still wanted your attention. Well, and a place where we could have a private conversation instead of a public one."

Harry walked into the kitchen and poured himself a glass of Firewhisky before he answered. It gave him time to get his shaking and his temper under control. He turned around, sipping, and considered Malfoy.

Malfoy wore soft, fine, pale dress robes that Harry had to admit looked good on him—not that that excused breaking into Harry's home again. At the moment, he stared into the flames and looked a lot like a scolded little kid. Harry worried his lip between his teeth for a moment, then sighed and put the drink down.

"What did you want to talk to me about?" he asked.

Malfoy turned and beamed hesitantly at him. "Does this mean I'm forgiven?" he asked, eyes wide and appealing.

"Let's not talk about that for right now," Harry said. "I don't know myself. But I am curious as to what could be important enough to make you break in again."

"I want to—you said what most upset you was the way that another Auror's files got destroyed," Malfoy said, and now he was swishing his hand through the air by his side, in random patterns. Harry decided that was all right as long as he wasn't carrying a wand. "I think I came up with a way to make it up to her. But I wanted your opinion before I did it, in case it upset you again."

Harry smiled in spite of himself. "In case it upset _me_?" he asked. "You don't care all that much about upsetting her?"

Malfoy looked up, eyes clear and as honest as Harry had ever seen them. All right, perhaps _more _honest than he had ever seen them. "No," he responded, gently. "I'm still who I am, and you still matter to me more than most other people. If it makes her happy, fine, I can be satisfied with that. But my main concern is the effect it will have on you, and thus on me."

Harry studied him. On the one hand, as he could almost hear Hermione arguing, he didn't know if he could live with someone whose compassion would always be conditional, who would value himself and Harry so much more than everyone else.

On the other hand, he understood the impulse. He had quit the Aurors to spare himself aggravation and because of concerns connected with Malfoy, and consideration of how many people might suffer that way, because he wasn't able to help them any longer, hadn't stopped him.

_We can meet in the middle, maybe, approaching it from opposite directions._

"What did you have in mind?" he asked.


	17. Paths Through the Archives

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Seventeen—Paths Through the Archives_

"And how long have you had _this _here?"

Harry thought he kept his voice kind and friendly, he really did. But it must not have been enough, if the way that Malfoy flashed him a sly glance was any indication.

"What, Potter, still so protective of the Ministry?" he murmured, lifting his modified lantern high. It burned like a torch, flickering blue flame on the end of a handle that looked like driftwood, but the flame was capped with a small structure of glass that Malfoy said would never shatter. Well, he knew best, Harry reckoned, but he still could have used a _Lumos _with less fuss_. _He glared at the torch as he replied.

"Not so much protective of them as wondering how the fuck you fooled so many people," he muttered.

"Oh, I have my ways," Malfoy said, and Harry didn't miss the smile that sparked and curled around the corner of his mouth as he made the door that led into the Ministry Archives—the _secret _door, the one that Harry would have been prepared to swear didn't exist—swing open. Harry had to muffle a snort. Malfoy was grinning not so much at his own cleverness as at the way Harry responded to it, Harry was suddenly sure. "And an enormous fortune to use to bribe people is rather good as well. I'm sure you'll agree." He turned the torch downwards, and the path of pale blue light cut into the darkness, illuminating the stone steps.

Harry waited for Malfoy to go first, instinct when he was following someone he still only half-trusted, and shook his head. "Did you do so much stealing in order to add to your fortune?"

"For the purposes of bribery? Sometimes." Malfoy turned on the largest step to look up at him. "But most of all, it was a way to please myself, and a way to keep your attention. You don't know how much of the evidence you found about me I _planted, _to make sure that you wouldn't look elsewhere."

Harry wanted to pause in the middle of a step, but that would have made him fall over, so he just stood still and shook his head instead, staring at Malfoy. "Sometimes, the more I find out about you, the less I think I like you," he muttered.

"This is the way I am," Malfoy said, his voice as deep and soft as the dust that drifted through the air. "And I don't need to do things like that anymore, not if I have you honestly at my side."

Harry chose not to answer that, but pressed forwards. Malfoy took the hint and kept walking, his legs moving in small elegant steps as the stairs corkscrewed under him.

Harry watched his back, and watched the walls, and wondered when Malfoy had first found the passage, when he had decided to use it for this purpose, and why the person he bribed hadn't taken more precautions. Of course, if the way Malfoy had discussed this person was correct, their own greed might have outweighed it.

They reached the bottom of the stairs a few minutes later. Harry did glance over his shoulder as Malfoy swept the torch towards the door in front of them, but saw nothing. The door at the top of the flight must have fallen shut.

Malfoy bent down to the door in front of him, and there were a few clicks and scrapes and complicated noises that made Harry want to flinch. He grasped control by grinding his teeth and locking his hands in front of him. The door trembled, flinched, and then fell open. Malfoy stepped forwards without a sound. Harry drew on his Auror training to follow.

"There's a wand trained on you," said a voice from the darkness ahead of them.

"Herbert." Malfoy came to a stop, but from the evidence in his voice, there was a smile on his face. "Did you _really _think that anyone else would be coming out the door? Who else could you have sold the secret to? Be honest now," he added, in a coaxing way. "You know that what I admire about you is your honesty."

There was nothing from the man in front of them for some moments, and then the wand trained on them lit with a _Lumos. _Harry stepped to the side. He had already used a small glamour on his face, one that would only affect people who didn't know who he was. There was no reason Herbert should react to him violently, the way he might an Auror who he thought had come to spy on him, but Harry wanted to have room to move.

Herbert turned out to be a small Archivist with his robes permanently bunched up around him as though he was cold. He had bright brown eyes, and he glared at Malfoy out of them like a mole while folding his arms and giving a violent shiver. His wand shook.

"You're not the only one who could have found it," he mumbled. "I'm not the only one who could have seen you."

Malfoy clucked his tongue, but didn't give a verbal response other than that. "Come, come, Herbert," he said. "You know what we've come for, and what I promised you in return."

For a moment more, Harry thought Herbert might still protest, but the noise lost itself in another shiver. With a sniff, he turned away from them and threaded his way back through an open door into a room with a large table, several desks, and innumerable cabinets all strewn with paper. Harry had no idea how he would ever find anything in such a mess, but Herbert must have had a system. He snatched up a slim red folder and brought it back to them.

Malfoy took it, but held it out to Harry at once. "Would you do the honors?"

Harry opened the folder and skimmed down the center of the papers, feeling his mouth harden. Yes, there were Flowing's files, with her loopy, scribbling scrawl at the bottom, and the slightly neater hand of her partner beside it. Just one copy of every single page instead of the multiple ones Thorin would have demanded, which was why the file was so slender, but still more than enough to replace the papers she'd lost.

"How did you get these?" he asked, shutting the folder and holding it close to his chest in case Herbert tried to take it back. He was eyeing it, between bouts of trembling.

Herbert started a little as though he hadn't expected Harry to speak to him, and then said, "Oh. Well, of course most files are delivered as memos these days, and not by hand. It was a simple matter to place a spell on the papers that the memos were made from, so that they diverted to me and I could make a copy before sending them on to the offices they were supposed to go to."

Harry nodded. "And the ones that _were _hand-delivered?"

"I marked the offices of the Aurors that did that and ensured that they used paper that came from charmed, linked stacks," Herbert said simply. "That way, whatever they wrote on a piece of parchment from one stack would appear on a piece of parchment from the other—which was always in my possession."

Harry had to smile. "And _why _did you do it?"

Herbert stared at him with his mouth slightly open, then shook his head. "Everything must be recorded," he said, in the voice of someone describing a religious ceremony. "Only think what a mess we would be in, otherwise!"

Harry looked at Malfoy, but he only got a bland look in return. Malfoy either didn't understand Herbert's packrat instinct or wasn't about to admit he did. What mattered was that he had found and taken advantage of it, Harry reckoned.

He watched as Malfoy reached into his pocket and took out something small and round and shiny, faceted like some of the more expensive crystal balls Trelawney had had them use in Divination. Malfoy extended the globe with his palm flat, and Herbert took a single step forwards, his own hand clawing for it.

Malfoy folded his fingers over the globe, and Herbert groaned, his hands twitching. Harry told himself sternly that he didn't have the right to think that was strange; he had probably done the same thing with some of the evidence Malfoy had planted at his crimes.

_Which I'm a great deal angrier about._

"You know what this is, Herbert," Malfoy said, in the stern tones of someone speaking to a small child who kept having an accident on the floor. "You know what trouble I went through to get it. What are you going to do for me in return? These files are only part of the price." He nodded to the folder Harry held.

Herbert licked his lips, and appeared to be thinking deeply for a moment. Then he mumbled, "Not to tell anyone else about the passage into the Archive."

"And what else?" Malfoy circled his hand for a moment as though he would drop the globe. Herbert waved his arms frantically, and Malfoy obediently stopped his hand, although his fingers still crooked as though the crystal would slip through them any minute. "Come, come, Herbert, I want to know."

Herbert took a deep breath, and said, "Not to tell anyone else that I make copies of the memos."

"Right," Malfoy said, nodding, and then paused.

Herbert gave a sigh that seemed fetched up from deep inside him, and said, "And not to tell anyone else that I have all these copies down here in the first place. The _official _Ministry copies in the main part of the Archive are the only ones that anyone else should know about. I must never give the existence of my trove away in my eagerness to acquire new treasures." He sounded as if it was a catechism that Malfoy had made him recite many times, Harry thought.

"Good boy," Malfoy said, a tone in his voice that would have made Harry bristle if it was directed to _him_, but Herbert didn't seem to notice. Malfoy tossed the globe at him, and Herbert caught it and cradled it close to his chest, an awed expression on his face that Harry would have thought appropriate for a man holding his first child.

"What is it?" Harry muttered out of the side of his mouth.

"A globe that will permit him to record himself reading his files, all of them," Malfoy whispered back. "Another way to keep the information backed-up, and safe. They're new devices, from Finland, not very common here yet."

Harry couldn't help raising his eyebrows. "And you stole one, of course?"

Malfoy gave him a serene smile, and then turned to address Herbert again. "And of course you'll keep our coming here a secret, Herbert."

Herbert nodded, and then stepped towards the office overflowing with paper, the globe held firmly in his hands. Harry wondered if he would be able to choose what priceless copy to record first. It seemed likely he'd be stuck for at least a few hours.

Malfoy seemed satisfied, even if he hadn't got a verbal promise from Herbert about keeping their presence secret, and turned away. Harry followed him, shaking his head. "And is he really going to keep it quiet?" he asked, as Malfoy swung the door of the secret passage behind them again.

Malfoy glanced back once from the stairs to nod. "Herbert is really only concerned about his files. Like your Thorin, I suppose, but he isn't in a position of authority over people. As long as no one threatens his papers, he's happy, and discreet."

"If someone else does?" Harry asked, jogging to keep up. Malfoy was taking the staircase to the surface much faster than he'd gone down it. "I mean, if someone else figures out they can control him with a threat to them?"

Malfoy gave a thin smile. "Then I have other measures in place to deal with what he might betray."

Harry thought of the other uses Malfoy had probably put his "vast fortune" to, and decided that was true. They climbed in silence for a few minutes until he cleared his throat. "How much of the evidence that I collected did you plant?" he asked.

"I can hear the weight in your voice," Malfoy said, without turning around and without faltering in the way he climbed. "If that was your best attempt at a casual tone, it was a miserable failure."

Harry ground his teeth, and counted to twenty. That didn't usually work for him, but when he had physical exertion, like climbing narrow stairs, to concentrate on, it was better. "Answer the question," he said at last.

"I don't know, now," Malfoy said, and turned around to look back at Harry, the light of the torch he had made reappear throwing his face into stark relief. He bent towards Harry and stared at him. "Is that what you want to hear? That I did it so often and so automatically, as part of the effort to keep your attention bent on me, that I've lost track of the numbers and the cases? Because that's the truth."

Harry closed his eyes and forced himself to remember Thorin, the endless cases he had worked on without any hope of return, the way that Thorin had admired the neat edge of a pile of parchments more than any work Harry and Ron had put in. He could have spent more and more intense labor in the Ministry, he could have produced the evidence that would convict Malfoy, in fact, and Thorin would have ignored it.

Being angry at Malfoy for planting fake evidence in straits like that was, really, like being angry at him for pissing in the ocean.

Harry finally shook his head and opened his eyes. "Are you going to do the same thing with my new career?" he asked.

Malfoy blinked and lowered his torch, which he had raised, Harry noted now for the first time, like a weapon. "You're not going to kill me?" he asked.

"Not right now, anyway," Harry said. "It's an option I'm keeping in mind for later." He inched past Malfoy to go on up the stairs. He didn't think he had anything to fear from having Malfoy at his back, now that he knew the staircase and he had the reassurance that Malfoy wasn't into necrophilia.

"What's your new career?" Malfoy asked his back. "As long as you're not intending to ignore me or date someone else, then I think I can accept it."

"Setting up a school that will teach Muggleborn children magic before they would get into Hogwarts," Harry said, and kept walking.

Malfoy breathed in the darkness, and then scrambled after him. "You're insane," he told Harry's back this time. "Do you know how many different people you would have to work with to establish something like that?"

"Yes," Harry said. "Hogwarts, because they're the ones who have access to the records of which children are born magical. The Ministry, to get some of the faction that's tired of blood prejudice on my side. Parents of Muggleborn children, who would be suspicious at first. The parents of pure-blood children who might not want their precious darlings attending school with people who aren't up to standard. Teachers, to learn who would teach there. I could do some flying and some elementary defensive spellwork, maybe, but I don't know anything about teaching anyone younger than teenagers. Hermione, so she can tell me—"

"It wouldn't _work_." Malfoy released those words in a triumphant pant; he had caught up with Harry and they were climbing side-by-side now. "You have no idea what's involved in something like this. You don't _know_."

"Then I'll _learn_." Harry faced Malfoy, and nearly made him step back off the edge of the stair they stood on. Harry shot a hand out and caught Malfoy's elbow so he wouldn't fall, then leaned in so close that Malfoy's eyes crossed. "That's the part of it that you don't understand, Malfoy. I am willing to learn new things. I learned that I was obsessed with you, and I learned that as long as Thorin's Head Auror, I was never going to be happy in the Ministry. I'll learn what I need to about founding a school, too. It might take a long time, but what the fuck else do I have to occupy my time?"

"That's a horrible reason for doing something like this." In the light of the torch, Malfoy's face was pale, set, stubborn. "Because you want to avoid being bored, or because you quit your job and you're looking for excitement."

Harry rolled his eyes. "Yeah. Endless meetings and learning to keep quiet and contending with prejudice. That's exciting, all right."

"Then why do it?" Malfoy pressed up close to him again, their chests touching through their robes. "Do something _else_."

"I don't _want _to," Harry hissed, and controlled the urge to shove him away again. "This is what I thought of. Something that will let me make a difference, that'll give me a goal to work for, that no one else is doing."

"Is that your desire for attention, again?" Malfoy's face twisted into a sneer.

And then Harry burst out laughing, because he couldn't take it anymore. He leaned against the wall and whooped; he turned his head up towards the door that would lead them out of the Ministry and laughed out loud. He went on laughing with tears coming from his eyes until Malfoy reached out, formed his hand into a fist, and knocked against his shoulder.

Then Harry mopped the tears out of his eyes and grinned at him. "Sorry," he said. "But who's the one who sacrificed everything for attention around here?"

Malfoy flushed, then shook his head. "All right," he said. "But why do something like this?"

"Because I don't want to be an Auror, or a Healer, or sit around home for the rest of my life," Harry said simply. "And because it'll let me use my name for something useful, for once, instead of trying to run away from it the way I have since the war." He looked Malfoy in the eye. "And since my obsession with you won't go away, I think it'll let me see you more than once in a while. Unless you're going to remove yourself from my life?"

Malfoy kissed him, hard and angry, his hands closing down on Harry's cheeks, his tongue practically forcing its way in. Harry moaned in approval and ran his hands up and down and around Malfoy's arse, letting them rest lightly there, in contrast to the squeeze on his face.

Malfoy drew back and stared at him. "Just try and get away without seeing me," he said.

Harry smiled at him, savage and slow. "Good."


	18. Reluctant Partners

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Eighteen—Reluctant Partners_

"I didn't know you were so bothered about blood prejudice."

Harry ignored Malfoy. He could still hear him behind him, even kneeling the way Harry was with his head in the fireplace, but he had to concentrate on the conversation with Auror Flowing that was coming up, not Malfoy's random bitching. Malfoy had enough to occupy him with Harry's first plan for the school that he'd scribbled down on several sheets of parchment, and Harry knew he would make lots of criticisms, too. He might as well ignore them now, since he was sure Malfoy would repeat them again and again over the next several days.

Flowing, who had appeared when he called the main fireplace in the Department, stared at him blankly, and then shook her head. "Aur—I mean, Mr. Potter? Is there something wrong?" She looked as though she was ready to shrug the blame off on someone else if so, and Harry couldn't blame her. She would have had enough of being blamed for what she couldn't prevent after Malfoy's stunt with the owl spell.

"I wanted you to know that a folder with copies of your memos and other files that were lost in the destruction is on its way to you," Harry said carefully.

Flowing stared at him. Then she rose and backed away. Harry opened his mouth, wondering if she had gone to fetch someone and end this dangerous conversation, but he heard a distant bang, and Flowing hurried back to the fireplace. Evidently she'd just closed the door.

"How did you manage that?" she whisper-hissed. "Even though you could do a lot of things, why didn't you do it _earlier, _if you could?"

Harry inclined his head. That was a fair question, and he knew that he couldn't answer all of it. Like hell was he about to say anything about Herbert or the Archives. That would plug a hole in the Ministry's security, yes, but he no longer owed them any loyalty.

"I'm sorry," he said. "Matters took a little while to get this far. But I promise, it's all the files that you made for any kind of public consumption. If you wrote private records, they might not be there." There had to be a limit even to Herbert's powers, after all. "But you'll have back what you need, and you can show them to Head Auror Thorin, if he's still talking to you about how this is your fault."

"He is," Flowing said. "He's _Thorin_." She hesitated, and nibbled her lip. Then she said, "I don't blame you for quitting. Every time I think he can't get more obsessed with paper and power, he does."

Harry nodded. "Maybe, once upon a time, we would have needed a Head Auror like that. Now I just think of him as a prick."

Flowing laughed, a sharp little bark like a seal's. "That's a good way to think of him." She spent a moment looking into Harry's eyes, which surprised him. He'd thought she would thank him or end the conversation by now. "How much do you want for it?" she asked abruptly. "What's the price?"

"For getting you your files back?" Harry shook his head. "I didn't do it to create a debt, but to repay one. You would never have ended up in trouble in the first place if my tactics against the criminal I was chasing hadn't backfired."

Flowing stared at him for so long that Harry thought the conversation would become impossible, and was about to bid her farewell. But then she said, "You're with him, aren't you? Or you captured him. The—one you were hunting." She glanced over her shoulder, probably towards the door Harry had heard her shut.

"Yes," Harry said gently. "I did what I couldn't do as long as I stayed in the Aurors. You don't need to worry about it rebounding back on you, though. I promise. That's over and done with."

Flowing shook her head. "I wasn't worried about that," she said, though from the way her eyes tightened, Harry thought she was lying. "I just wanted to know, and to say that I think you should think carefully before you trust him."

"Believe me, I know," Harry said, and smiled at her. "Thanks for your concern." He hadn't realized that she wouldn't hate and resent him for getting her files destroyed; it was a relief to find out she didn't, though.

Flowing gave him a little wave of her fingers, and then shut down the Floo connection. Harry leaned back from the fireplace with the satisfaction of a job well-done. He just wished he could have seen Thorin's face when Flowing showed him the replacements for all her files.

Still, perhaps, if he was good, Flowing would share her memory of Thorin's expression with him in a Pensieve someday.

"I can't _believe _that you care this much about this."

Harry stretched his arms above his head and made sure that all the muscles in his back were fully relaxed before he turned to face Malfoy. As expected, he had a sheaf of parchment in his hand and was glaring at Harry. Harry gave him a faint smile in return. "Why not? What is it that makes it hard to believe, that I can gather this amount of research in this amount of time, or that I can write articulate sentences?"

"The sentences I'll put down to Auror training, and not to your general brain damage," Malfoy said, for a moment smiling more like the criminal Harry had chased than the man Harry had willingly let into his home this morning.

"Thanks," Harry said, and rolled his eyes. Malfoy glanced down at the parchment in his hand so he wouldn't have to see.

"I mean," Malfoy said, "that you haven't struck me as a warrior against blood prejudice in the past, but here you paint yourself as nothing but. You can't have any notion how long and _exhausting _a struggle like this is going to be."

Harry kept smiling, but inwardly he wanted to laugh. So Malfoy was his, was _caught_. He had thought this might happen. Malfoy would complain and criticize and maybe even hate him before this was all over, yes, but he would fight the battle at Harry's side. Because he couldn't walk away from Harry any more than Harry could turn away from him.

"I do know," he said, more gently. "That's one reason that I wasn't sure you would want to be with me enough to even come over here and read the documents this morning."

Malfoy turned fully to face him, arms folded and chin up in a way that said he had heard Harry's silent laughter and probably had his own version. Harry winced a little in spite of himself, and stood to attention. In his own way, Malfoy was more intimidating than Thorin. He could have had a deeper career in politics if he'd wanted one.

"I think you need someone to keep you from killing yourself with battles you can't win," Malfoy said. "Someone to make sure that you still have enough energy left over for other things. And that's me."

Harry smiled, even as he felt his blood accelerate. "I don't think you quite understand what I'm doing here, Malfoy," he said. "I won't give up no matter what you say. You can't persuade me out of it."

"_Idiot_," Malfoy said. "You can't win in a day, either. I mean that you need someone who can teach you to relax, to compromise when necessary—and you'll need to do that on occasion, Potter," he added as Harry opened his mouth. "If you don't think so, you really know _nothing _about this at all, and the most responsible thing to do would be to never let you start it."

"I can compromise on something like what subjects get taught at the schools," Harry said. "Not on their existence, or on the idea of teaching Muggleborn children at all."

Malfoy made an impatient noise, and strode towards him, circling around him at an easy pace. Harry, with an effort, kept his hands off his wand. It was exactly the same sort of thing many Dark wizards he'd chased would have done to make him nervous, and although Malfoy only belonged to one category now and not the other…well, it was still hard.

"Of course I was talking about the first kind of compromise, Potter," Malfoy snapped, halting in front of him. "You propose everything at first, including those bargains that you think you'll never get, and then you look magnanimous when you back away and seem to give in to what they're asking for."

Harry nodded seriously. "Then I only have one question."

"What's that?" Malfoy relaxed the tiniest bit, rocking back on his heels and staring at Harry. Harry thought he might be fighting a smile.

"What does 'magnanimous' mean?"

Malfoy's frown only lasted until he saw the smile that Harry was trying to hide. Then he reached out and struck him, hard, on the back of the head. Harry reached up and caught his wrist before he could do it a second time, to show that _he _could, and let the smile out.

* * *

"There is no way that this could work."

Harry wondered for a moment what Malfoy's tactic would be, in the face of that. He had said they needed to begin as if they wanted everything and then back away, yielding what they had never expected to win, but in the face of the flat refusal of Julius Pembroke-Wiltshire, the Wizengamot member in charge of Education, there wasn't any place for them to start.

Malfoy half-leaned forwards across the space that separated their chairs from Pembroke-Wiltshire's gleaming ebony desk. His hand fell briefly on top of Harry's and squeezed. Harry turned his hand up so that his fingers brushed Malfoy's wrist. That was the signal they had agreed upon that Malfoy could be the one who began the retaliation.

It was so strange, Harry thought. Malfoy had gone from not realizing why breaking through Harry's wards could look bad to being absurdly solicitous for Harry's opinion and what he wanted Malfoy to do.

Then again, Malfoy did seem to take seriously the idea that Harry might leave him if he wasn't a little more considerate.

_And this is ridiculous, to think about this—whatever it is—in the middle of such an important meeting, _Harry thought, and focused his attention on Pembroke-Wiltshire's face again. He was frowning, looking down at them across a long and broad nose with eyes like an owl's. Harry waited, and let Malfoy take over with smooth voice and smoother persuasion.

"Sir," he murmured, "I assure you that we have thought of the advantages of this, and surely one of them is obvious?" He paused, as though inviting Pembroke-Wiltshire to make the contribution, and continued only when the man's face had flushed red for a few seconds and he hadn't answered. "This way, we can teach Muggleborns _our _way of thinking."

Pembroke-Wiltshire blinked and then nodded slowly. Harry made a mental note never to tell Hermione in detail about this meeting.

"As it is," Malfoy continued, "they come into the magical world _prepared _to despise us. We seem strange and inconsistent to them, because so much of what renders us native to magic is taught in those precious years before we go to Hogwarts. And so they react against us, and many of them return to the Muggle world when their education is done, wasting the time and money we've invested in them. This way, we can keep them in our world from the very beginning. Change them. Teach them our ways, instead of asking them to rebel against eleven years of training."

"The parents would never agree," Pembroke-Wiltshire said, but in the tones of someone who wanted to be convinced, from the way he swept his hand over Harry's parchments in front of him.

"I don't know about that," Malfoy said. He could sound smug without a smirk on his face, something Harry hadn't known. "The Muggle parents are as susceptible as magical people are to a judicious mixture of bribery, flattery, and fear. And they know so much _less _than we do," he added, watching Pembroke-Wiltshire.

Harry raised his eyebrows and watched as Malfoy turned blood prejudice into a weapon of their cause. For sure, it wasn't something he would have thought to do.

(And something else he would probably have to prevent Hermione from finding out about).

For a moment, Pembroke-Wiltshire sat still. Then he nodded and said, "There is something to be said for the way that pure-bloods think."

Malfoy nodded back and said nothing more, his hands clasped in his lap and an absurdly saintly look on his face, as though he longed to hear Pembroke-Wiltshire's thoughts more than to express his own.

Pembroke-Wiltshire shuffled the papers some more, and then cleared his throat. "As long as we can speak of what details we will offer the Muggle parents, and what other kinds of offers we will make to the pure-blood ones," he said, "then I will give this my blessing."

"Are you sure it'll be that simple?" Harry had to ask, because this conversation hadn't gone according to the plan that Malfoy had suggested at all. Then again, perhaps Pembroke-Wiltshire was simply greedier than most of those they'd have to convince.

Malfoy's elbow dug into his side, but Harry didn't take his gaze away from the Wizengamot member's face. If they were just going to have do this all over again later because the apparent conversion wasn't real, then Harry wanted to know now.

Pembroke-Wiltshire gave him a lazy smile. "There will be some parents who won't object to their children being raised alongside Mudbloods as long as they have a decent education. And as long as some of the things the wild children learn point to the importance of pure-blood heritage and culture."

Harry smiled. "Then we have a deal."

Pembroke-Wiltshire started to smile back, but froze when he saw the not-at-all-casual way that Harry's wand was pointed at his desk, or at least the portion of his desk where his legs would be. His eyes darted back up to Harry's. "You don't work for the Ministry anymore," he said, threat or prayer, Harry couldn't tell. "You have no idea what I can do to you now that you don't have the Auror Department's protection."

"You have no idea what kind of protection I could buy if I wanted," Harry said softly, "by offering nothing more than my name. And this is what I want. If you want to work with us, fine. If you hold some less than honorable motives for it, fine. I want schools established and working, and someone who provides me the means to accomplish that—I won't question _every _motive he has for doing it. But you're not going to express that same sort of contempt in front of me again. Or say that name."

Pembroke-Wiltshire shook his head, but Harry thought it was more a denial that this was happening than anything else. "How can you be that ignorant? You _know _how politics work in the Ministry."

"Yes, the ability to say anything in private while doing what you should in public," Harry said evenly. "But I was watching the expression on your face, _sir. _You didn't even hesitate before you spoke that insult, even though you know very well what my heritage is. That makes me think you might say it in public, too, and undermine everything. So I'll just protect your investment, and mine, and make it impossible to say _now_, all right?"

Pembroke-Wiltshire swallowed, and swallowed again. "Yes," he whispered at last. "_Yes, _you crazy bastard, all right, if you want to put it like that—"

Harry smiled again, and glanced at Malfoy. Malfoy was watching him with a steady, fascinated gaze, and made no motion, which meant that Harry could decide that there wasn't any reason after all to give Pembroke-Wiltshire the bribe they had decided on. He stood up and extended his hand. "Nice doing business with you."

Trembling, Pembroke-Wiltshire reached out. But Harry didn't have a blade in his hand, and in a moment, the man seemed to see that, and shook. Then Malfoy shook with him, as well, and they walked out of there and into the dim, cool corridor from which the Wizengamot's offices branched off.

Malfoy said nothing. Harry waited, and they Apparated back to his house, and Malfoy still said nothing. Harry finally sighed, rolled his eyes, shut the door behind him, and said, "Well?"

Malfoy turned to him, and yes, his _eyes _were saying something, so large and bright that Harry stared in spite of himself, and then Malfoy's hand was on his arm, and his fingers were closing down, and something thick and warm stirred to life in Harry.

"I didn't think he would be that stupid, so I didn't guard against him saying that word the way I should have," Malfoy admitted. "But, Harry. You were _brilliant_."

He pulled him into the kind of hungry kiss that Harry had to admit was pretty brilliant in and of itself, his hands moving up and down, and Harry shuddered—

And ignored the voice of Hermione in his head, and yielded.


	19. Not So Far Off

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Nineteen—Not So Far Off_

Harry kissed Malfoy until he felt as if he were standing on a high bridge that would crumble beneath him in the next strong wind. His muscles shook, and his hands shook, and he wanted to steady himself, but there was nowhere that he could put his hands save on the source of their tremor. He reached out and did it anyway, sliding his hands up to Malfoy's shoulders and resting them there as he swayed a little.

"That's right," Malfoy murmured, but his voice was as deep and drugged and sleepy as Harry felt, as if he were talking to himself. He reached out and pulled at Harry's shoulders, swaying, too. Harry went along with the pull, and their mouths came together again, and Malfoy laughed and nipped at his lips. "Want to do for you what you did for me."

Harry's mouth flooded with so much saliva that he knew he would only drool if he tried to speak. He settled for swallowing instead, and nodded several times.

Malfoy laughed at him, voice high and bright and clear, suddenly, like shards of jewels, and then winked and dropped to his knees. "I didn't _think _you would say no to that," he murmured, complacent, while he undid Harry's trouser buttons with delicate, flicking fingers.

Harry shut his eyes and thought briefly back to that night in Malfoy's home—no, not that, his bolthole, the places where he hid his secrets. It had all been a front from the beginning, including the idea that Malfoy was spent enough to lie still and doze while Harry explored his hidden rooms.

But _this_. This was in his own home, and Malfoy's hands were long and slim and knowing as they folded cloth back and took hold of skin.

_This _was real.

"Stop thinking so much," Malfoy said, and rubbed first one cheek against Harry's cock, then the other, before he leaned forwards and scooped Harry up in his mouth.

Harry thrust without thinking about it, and then tried to think about it and thrust again, and Malfoy laughed, so deep and rich that Harry felt it as a vibration in his body more than he heard it, and started to suck.

Harry staggered backwards, stiff, steep steps, and Malfoy reached up and held his hips. Harry braced himself on the wall, and took a few deep breaths, and shut his eyes until his heartbeat didn't dizzy him. Then he looked down.

_Malfoy. _

Bright and pale against the carpet, his hair against Harry's thighs, his tongue another flash of pink as he licked and darted it out. He looked up, and his eyes blazed as he held still, then reached a hand down and back and rubbed his knuckles against Harry's balls.

Harry shut his eyes again. That didn't stop the whirling, bubbling promise from his stomach, the tightening muscles, or the way that he felt he would fall down the wall and collapse on top of Malfoy if he didn't stop sucking. Or if he stopped. The whole world was confused and Harry breathed out a word.

"Please."

Malfoy said something muffled around the mouthful, and then sucked so hard it hurt. Harry stood up on his toes and yelped something that really _might _have been an order to stop, but luckily, Malfoy wasn't listening to him. He just went back to work, licking and sucking ferociously, clamping his lips down and humming, and brushing Harry again and again, in random place after random place, with the knuckles of his hand.

Harry felt the mouth, and imagined the hand spreading wide and flat and cupping him, or reaching up to his hole and—

He came, no forethought, no warning. It felt so _good. _He found himself with the memory of the pleasure more than the pleasure itself, standing with his head drooping down and his breath shuddering into silence.

Malfoy stood up, coughed a little, and gave him a smile that made Harry's head whirl. He reached out and pulled Malfoy close, kissing him until he couldn't find a trace of the taste in his hot mouth anymore.

Then Malfoy coughed a second time and shifted a little to the left, and Harry felt Malfoy's erection brush along his side with a thrill that made him shudder and wish he could be hard again.

"What do you want me to do to you?" Harry whispered in his ear, smoothing his fingers up and down Malfoy's knee without touching his cock. Malfoy's eyes rolled back in his head, and he made a choking noise that was good for Harry's ego, although his fingers tingled to touch. He smiled. "Whatever you want."

Malfoy lowered his head and looked at him. "_Whatever_," he said.

Harry blinked, and remembered who he was talking to. "Well, if you want something like snakes going up people's—holes, then you're on your own," he said. "But whatever I can do by myself, with my mouth, my arse, my hands. It's yours."

Malfoy kissed him again, and spent a long moment touching Harry's teeth with his tongue before he pulled back. "You're remarkably generous," he whispered. "Strange that I never got that impression when you were chasing me."

"Generous _there _would have been to let you go," Harry said, and pulled him towards the bedroom, fingers playing over the muscles in Malfoy's arms the way that Malfoy's tongue had played in his mouth. "Obviously the one thing I can't do."

"I'm _glad _that you can't do it," Malfoy said, his voice dipping down into darkness. "I don't want to suffer through this alone."

Harry thought anything he could say after that was going to sound stupid, so he simply kissed Malfoy and pushed him onto the bed. "You still haven't said what you want," he murmured, starting to pull his clothes off. His trousers were wet with himself, and he touched the stickiness for a moment with his fingers, then left it.

"I want your arse," Malfoy said, leaning back and spreading his legs as though that would give Harry a better view of him when he was still dressed. Well, it gave Harry a better view of his inner thighs and the small dark patch at his groin that came from his cock leaking, at least, and Harry made the first of many noises from the back of his throat. "But not in the way you think."

"No snakes, I think I said," Harry murmured, and dipped his head to pull his shirt off. When he could see again, Malfoy was looking at him with his tongue and teeth slickly shining, and Harry had to crawl onto the bed and kiss him.

When Malfoy finally pulled back, he murmured, "I am—intrigued by the fact that taking off your shirt manages to make your hair look _wilder. _I hadn't thought there were degrees of how scruffy you could look, but I see that you've proven me wrong."

"I always will," Harry said, and yanked at his trousers. "Let's get you naked."

"I'd prefer," Malfoy said, taking Harry's hand away with the same negligent grace he'd shown when he handed the opal to Harry, "to do it myself. And keep my shirt on." He gave Harry a smile that was from deep down inside himself, just like the little grunts and groans and pants that kept coming out of Harry. "It makes the game I have in mind sexier."

Harry settled back on his heels and watched as Malfoy pulled off his trousers and pants. The smell of him filled the air, astringent and searching in a way that Harry could imagine staying on his sheets for a good long time. He sniffed, and smiled. "I can't imagine you being more sexy than you already are."

Malfoy rolled upright and came for him, arms reaching out, eyes so dark that Harry knew he'd stopped playing. He let Malfoy roll Harry beneath him, his shirt dangling against Harry's skin and making him shudder with the prickle of fine cloth and little buttons, and spread his legs suggestively.

"No," Malfoy whispered, then took his earlobe in his teeth and held it there until Harry had begun to melt. "Up on all fours," came the second whisper.

Harry nodded, rolled over, and managed to force himself onto his hands and knees, once again wishing he could still get hard. Malfoy moved behind him, and Harry couldn't help clenching, arching his head to look back.

"What a very, _very _fine arse you have," Malfoy whispered, sticking out one hand and running his fingers lightly over Harry's cheeks and hole, up and down and back and forth. "I knew there was a reason that I kept chasing you for so long."

Harry laughed in spite of himself, then choked up and had to let his head droop and hang. He wondered what he would feel next, and was braced for almost anything. Malfoy's hand, a paddle, his tongue?

Instead, Malfoy, probably with the help of a spell, managed to reach out and around Harry. His arms framed Harry's, his chest came to rest on Harry's back, and his shirt and his hair spilled around them both. And his cock came to settle on top of Harry's arse, both of them already tilting restlessly back and forth.

Harry shivered, and not entirely because of the way that Malfoy's shirt was tickling his sides and his ribs. He nodded and braced himself, running his fingers into the sheets but shifting so that the sides of his wrists brushed Malfoy's hands draped over his.

"Yeah, I'll hold us up," he said, his voice so breathy that he had trouble recognizing it. "Do whatever you want to do."

Malfoy breathed a sigh of relief so great that it made Harry wonder how long he had carried this fantasy, and then he began to rub back and forth, over Harry's arse. Harry closed his eyes and thought about it, about the rub of smooth skin there, and then he just _felt _it, the slight touch that grew wetter as it went on, and the way that Malfoy was grunting and moaning. Now and then, he pulled back far enough to put space in between them, and then thrust forwards again.

Harry panted and went down on his elbows, because trying to hold them both up on his hands was getting too much for him. Draco murmured and muttered and rustled, and then found the new angle again, the new pace, his cock dragging across Harry's crack. Harry exhaled hard, rooting his elbows down further, and jumped a bit as one of Draco's buttons caught on a thin hair on his back.

"So good," Draco said, his voice as hazy as it had been when they were kissing.

"Yeah," Harry breathed back.

Draco hesitated, and Harry wondered for a second if something was wrong. Then Draco began to thrust, hard, against his arse, no longer perfectly on top of him but pulling back so that, yeah, there was space between them, and Harry's skin twitched and his cock stirred. He hissed, pushing back.

"No, no, stay still," Draco whispered, and Harry managed to do that for him, head falling down so that the sheets cradled his cheek, his mouth slick and full of saliva. Draco thrust, and thrust, and Harry let himself imagine what would it be like when there were no barriers between them, imagined those hands that had stolen jewels and paintings and wands taking his—

He would have come again if he could when he felt Draco coming, slicker than ever, panting in his ear now as he slumped back over Harry. Harry let himself fall all the way down, and then turned and brushed Draco's hair away from his face.

"Clean me up," Draco muttered, his eyes shut.

Harry found his wand nearer than he'd thought it would be, and reckoned it was lucky they hadn't broken it, bouncing up and down in the bed the way they had. Hell, they'd probably been lucky not to break the bed. He yawned when he was done, and burrowed down until his head was resting next to Draco's face.

Draco was already asleep, his lips parted as though it was just too much effort to breathe through his nose. Harry lay staring into his face, and lost track of the moment when he fell asleep himself.

* * *

"And what are you doing there?" The voice was familiar, crackling like lightning across Harry's mind and breaking his dreams. He stirred, frowning.

"You can call me his…nursemaid." From the sound of Malfoy's voice, he had chosen that title because he knew it would annoy whoever else was talking.

Silence, so long and ominous that Harry started to roll towards the edge of his bed, and then Hermione's voice said, "_What_?"

Harry stood up, took a second to make sure that he had his glasses on, and then realized he was still mostly naked and started dressing, fast. Malfoy was making some response, from the sound of it a long, elaborate speech, to Hermione's question, and Harry wanted to get out there before it got any worse.

He stumbled out, deciding that he didn't need socks, in time to see the flare of the Floo connection closing. Malfoy, who had been leaning near it as though trying to catch every word, chuckled and leaned back as he stretched, seeming pleased with himself.

"What did you say to her?" Harry asked, quietly, feeling his stomach drop as he thought of all the things Malfoy _could _have said, and that it had probably gone even worse than he imagined.

Malfoy turned around and looked at him, cocking his head. "There you go, disposed to blame me again," he said. "You _are _tiresome."

Harry hissed between his teeth and spent a second massaging the skin between his eyes. Only when he took his hand away and looked at Malfoy again, finding him coiled and staring, did he remember his scar was there and what it would probably mean to Malfoy that he was rubbing it.

Harry shook his head and tried to smile. "It never hurts anymore," he said. "Not since the war. Unless someone's hit me on the head or something."

Malfoy didn't smile. He stood up and said, "You think it's my fault, whatever I said to her. What right does she have to call you like this, at nine in the morning, when she knows that you don't have to go to work anymore?"

"Hermione likes to check up on me." Harry turned away and started casting the series of charms that would make breakfast go right in the kitchen. He used to cook by hand a lot more, but it had started becoming too much like what he remembered doing for the Dursleys, especially when he had no one else to cook for, so he'd stopped. "You can't blame her for that."

Malfoy's hand came to rest low on his stomach, and Harry hesitated, then leaned back against him. Malfoy kissed him near his ear, and Harry felt his eyelids droop.

"Last night, it was so good," Malfoy whispered, and his hand wandered towards Harry's groin.

Harry caught his wrist, and turned his hand over. Malfoy had no calluses, of course. Harry wondered what sort of wear and tear on the hands you'd expect of someone who was a professional thief and Potions master.

"Yeah, it was," he said, and turned around. "But right now, breakfast is cooking, and I just want to know what you said to her. And what she said to you."

Malfoy watched him, eyes wide and wary. Harry wanted to shake his head, but he knew Malfoy would take that the wrong way, so he just thought, _Look at the pair of us. Obsessed with each other, and still not able to live together._

_Well. This is the way that we'll just have to live._

"She asked what I was doing there," Malfoy said at last, his voice a resentful little mumble. "And she didn't even give me a chance to answer before she was _talking _again. I told her I was your nursemaid, and that I was taking care of you, and she yelled at me. Said that you would never take me as a lover, and that I must be hiding something and—I don't know, by that time she was talking too fast for me to understand."

Harry smiled in spite of himself. "Yeah, that sounds like Hermione," he said. He held out a hand. "I _promise _that I won't slap you if you come closer," he added, when Malfoy stared at it. "I just wanted to know."

Malfoy nodded, and stepped closer. "I did insult her," he said.

Harry sighed, but said nothing. That was something he would have to get used to, he thought, until it got to the point where either Hermione got used to the tone of Malfoy's insults or they got bad enough that Harry's obsession waned and he decided that he'd rather not see Malfoy anymore. Not for one moment did he think Malfoy would stop if Harry asked him to.

He turned back to the kitchen, but Malfoy rested his hand on his arm. Harry turned around and waited.

Malfoy watched him with shadowed eyes for so long that Harry got worried about the toast burning, but he held still. This was more important than whether he had to clear out smoke from his kitchen, he thought.

"You haven't asked me when I plan to give up my thefts," Malfoy said carefully.

Harry took a deep breath. "I recognized that I wouldn't get anywhere," he said. "Any more than you would if you tried to talk me out of setting up these schools."

Malfoy's fingers flexed open and shut on his arm. "And what happens if you wake up some morning and I'm gone? What will you do?"

Harry looked down at the faded Dark Mark on his arm, and then back up and along to Draco's face. "Wait for you to come back," he said.

Draco stared at him with a face made sheer by disbelief, and then cocked his head. "It doesn't _bother _you?"

"Hell, _yes, _it does," Harry said, and then tried to control himself when he saw the way that Draco continued to stare at him. "Of course it does," he continued, quietly, after a moment. "But I'm not part of the Ministry anymore. I'm not paid to care. And _they _don't care enough to stop you. There's nothing—I'm tired of pouring effort into that case that no one appreciates." He sighed and shook his head. "I reckon they can suffer for it."

Draco opened his mouth ask another question, but then leaned nearer and kissed him again, long and slow. His hands slipped back beneath the trousers Harry had pulled on to appease Hermione, and this time, Harry didn't resist.

Breakfast did burn. But Harry cooked another one, and sat eating it, and watching the way that Draco's hair glittered in the sunlight through the window.

It wasn't perfect. Nothing was.

_But this is the way we'll live._


	20. Finding the Foundations

Thank you again for all the reviews! This is the last chapter of _Anarchy As Art. _Thanks for reading.

_Chapter Twenty—Finding the Foundation_

"I just don't think that you'll be happy, that's all."

Harry sighed gustily and leaned back with his arm over his eyes. They were once again in the glassed-in space behind Hermione's house, but Harry was enjoying himself less this time than he usually did. If Hermione would only stop going _on_ about Draco, then it would be better.

_And why not make her stop?_

Harry paused, with his arm still over his eyes. Hermione didn't pause, still talking softly about how she thought someone who ignored all law and order in the way that Draco did wouldn't make Harry happy, but his heartbeat seemed to, and the thoughts that had danced madly through his head since he came on this visit.

_Draco doesn't talk constantly about his thefts and the other things he does that you don't like. You live with them, and you don't try to stop them or change him, and he doesn't shove them in your face, in return. Why not ask Hermione if she isn't willing to make the same bargain? She thinks of herself as someone who likes you better than Draco does, after all. She should be able to agree._

"I don't want to talk about this anymore," Harry said, sitting up and reaching for the glass of orange juice in front of him. He had thought it was too sticky-sweet when Hermione first poured it for him, but right now it was perfect. He sipped slowly and watched Hermione turn her head to stare at him with her mouth open.

"What?" she asked at last, voice small.

"I don't want to talk about Draco with you anymore," Harry said, and smiled at her. "Yes, I know that you're concerned. Well, you've voiced those concerns. I've heard them, and I'll think about them. And hell, Hermione, it's not like I don't have concerns myself when I think about him being a thief and the way that we used to hate each other. But I've chosen to live with him, and the way that you keep talking about him just makes me miserable. It doesn't help at _all_."

Hermione blinked as though that perspective had never occurred to her. Then she said, still in a tender, exploring voice that apparently showed she needed time to get used to this idea, "So, you—you want—"

"I want you to stop talking about him," Harry said. "I won't brag about his illegal activities and make you listen to anything you don't want to hear, and in return you won't lecture me about him. _I _don't want to hear _that_."

Hermione leaned towards him and put her hand over his on the table. Harry sat up. He knew that was what she did when she was about to launch into a new kind of lecture, and he _still _wasn't in the mood to listen.

"Harry," she said tenderly. "I don't think you've considered all the implications that just putting up with him might have."

Harry took his hand back, not angrily but in a way that made it impossible for Hermione not to notice, and sipped at his orange juice again. "Just consider that I have," he said. "I've thought about this for a _long _fucking time, Hermione. I've thought about whether I could live with it or if I should try to let him walk away again, and the one conclusion I've come to is that walking away doesn't work for us and never will. So let's skip the arguments and the whining and the attempts to convince me that I don't want to do this. I do, and it's all settled."

Hermione spent a moment more staring at him, wrongfooted. Then she said, "If I can come up with a new argument, would you listen to it?"

Harry laughed in spite of himself. Sometimes he thought Hermione had spent so long struggling against other people since the war, fighting to be noticed by people who despised her blood, fighting for house-elf rights, fighting to clear up some of the obvious corruption in the Ministry, that she didn't know how to exist when someone wasn't opposing her.

"No," he said gently. "I won't make you sit next to him at dinner or even eat with him if you don't want to, don't worry. But I don't want to listen to you talk about him."

Hermione appeared to be chewing something over. Then she opened her mouth, but Harry looked at her with his eyebrows raised and a faint smile on his face, and in the end she murmured, defeated, "No, I suppose that's an argument we've already had, too."

Harry saluted her with his glass of orange juice, and determinedly switched the conversation to Ron, and how he was doing in the Aurors without Harry by his side. That was a subject that would always interest him, no matter how far he drifted from the Aurors, simply because it was Ron.

* * *

"Mr. Potter, just a _moment _of your time."

Harry hid his groan, and nodded and turned around so he faced Rita Skeeter. She was scrambling towards him along the row of public Floo fireplaces in the Ministry Atrium, patting at her hair so that it would stay in place. "Of course, Ms. Skeeter," he said. "Is there something I can tell you?"

She jerked to a stop and looked at him with big, breathless eyes, as though puzzled he didn't try to run away. Then she said, "I heard that you have a plan involving Muggleborn children and _schools, _Mr. Potter. An ambitious one."

Harry nodded. "I think Muggleborn children should be educated at wizarding primary schools, not left out. And that means that we need to make sure they're introduced to our world earlier. It's going to take a lot of work, but it's a worthy goal."

Skeeter was scribbling with her Quick-Quotes Quill, lips moving as though she was repeating his words. Harry was sure she wasn't, and he'd see some distorted version of his little speech in the _Daily Prophet _tomorrow, but he watched with a tolerant eye. Things were going to be misrepresented in this fight. He might as well get used to it.

"What made you decide to take up this goal?" Skeeter leaned towards him with her eyelashes fluttering. "The same thing that made you step away from the Ministry, perhaps? They _say_," she went on, rushing so fast that Harry couldn't have answered her even if he wanted to, "that it's a mysterious new lover."

"I'll tell you," Harry said, lowering his voice and stepping nearer to her. "I'll even grant you an exclusive interview, if you like."

Skeeter was easily tempted, but not an idiot. She ran her tongue along her lower lip twice before she asked, "And the price?"

"You have to write an article to _my _specifications," Harry said, and showed her a mean little smile that he didn't think she'd been ready for, because it made her gasp in what sounded like delight and surprise. "One specifically about a few members of the Ministry who are so corrupt that they can't see you unless you've got Galleons in hand."

Skeeter's eyes sparkled. "You intrigue me extremely, Mr. Potter," she said. "Do you have time for that exclusive interview right now, or were you here on important business in the Ministry?" Her tone was solicitous.

"About to talk to the Wizengamot member in charge of Education, Mr. Pembroke-Wiltshire," Harry said, and gave her a smile that actually made Skeeter clasp her hands to her bosom as though her heart was going to jump out of it. "Would you like to come along and watch the fireworks? Perhaps _cause _some of them?"

Skeeter reached out and rested her hand on his elbow, turning smartly so that they were both walking towards the lifts together. "Mr. Potter," she crooned as she erased some of what she'd written down with the Quick-Quotes Quill, "I can see that we're going to be the very _best _of friends."

* * *

"Shall I show you the things I stole this afternoon?"

Harry started and looked up from the stack of parchment in front of him, reports on the state of wizarding education for the past eight years, that he'd borrowed from Pembroke-Wiltshire's office. His mind was mush with numbers and facts and locations and names, and it took him a long moment to realize that Draco was standing in a shaft of sunlight that fell through Harry's front window, posed, with his arms folded behind his head and his legs crossed in front of him.

Harry smiled at him, and tried to ignore the quickening pulse in his groin for the moment. "Was there anything for me?"

Draco chuckled, a low sound that reminded Harry of the way Skeeter had laughed when Pembroke-Wiltshire opened his office door and saw her and Harry together, and then reached down to a chain hanging around his neck, which Harry had assumed without thinking held keys. "_Is _there," he said.

"That's what I asked," Harry said, and then his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth and he coughed as his breath tried to do the same thing.

"Beautiful, isn't it?" Draco asked softly, turning the emerald ring in his hands back and forth so that the jewel blazed in the sunlight.

"Beautiful," Harry said. He'd never cared all that much for jewelry, but even _he _could tell this was something special, the shining stone revealing depths of green that he'd never known a simple stone could.

Draco took a single step forwards, and offered the ring with a sweeping bow. Harry looked at the simple gold band for a minute, and wondered if it was engraved on the inside with the initials of the real owner, or some message about love and faithfulness that would make him feel bad when he tried to wear it. But he didn't see or feel any letters like that when he slid it onto his finger.

The stone sparked in the sunlight when he turned his hand, too. And Harry felt a great surge of simple happiness at its beauty, and gladness that Draco had found it for him.

"I can't wear it long," he said softly, looking at the ring and not Draco. "I'd start feeling too bad about it."

Draco stepped up to him and ran a hand down his neck, as though he wanted to offer him a massage because he'd spent so long bent over his paperwork. "I know," Draco said. "It was only a loan to you, anyway. In a little while I'll take it back and take it on to the fate that I've planned for it."

Harry turned and glanced up at him. "What's that? And where did you steal it from, anyway?"

Draco met his eyes and didn't smile, although that made him look stern and adult, instead of giving him the constipated look that it usually did when he refused to answer one of Harry's questions. "Do you want to know that?" he asked softly. "Because I'll tell you if you do. But otherwise, I'd appreciate it if you didn't ask questions."

Harry winced. "Yeah, that was a bit bloody stupid of me," he muttered, turning the ring over and over, spinning it so that the stone and the band shone. It moved easily on his finger. Made for someone with larger hands that he had, Harry thought, but that was as far as he would go in trying to guess the owner. "Sorry."

Draco kissed the back of his neck. "Enjoy it while you have it," he said, and then took the ring off Harry's second finger, where he'd placed it instinctively, and studied it. "But I think it would look better like _this_."

He slid it onto the fourth finger of Harry's left hand, and held it there as if he wanted all the sunlight in the world to pour through the window and linger on the jewel.

Harry stared at him, and then at the emerald. "Draco," he said, voice trailing off into silence.

Draco kissed the back of his neck, and ran his fingers further down, getting them under Harry's shirt so that he could touch his ribs properly—or what he tended to call "properly" in conversations with Harry. "Hush," he whispered. "Don't say anything. Just enjoy."

Harry decided that he could do that, even if he didn't have a lot of practice in it yet and had to talk to people instead of doing it decently on the first try, and leaned his head back so they could kiss. Draco nipped at his lips and made quite a proper go of it before he pulled Harry's shirt off over his head and sank down between his legs.

Later they fucked with the emerald ring still clinging and sparkling on Harry's finger, and then Draco took it off him and laid it on the table beside the bed. Harry was still watching it when he went to sleep.

When he woke, both the ring and Draco were gone. Harry sighed and settled in to study the files and, as he had said he would do, wait for Draco to come back.

* * *

"Mr. Potter, I still don't understand _how _you're going to do this." Skeeter's voice dripped treacle. She'd set up the questions in advance with him, of course, but they still sounded natural—and anyway, everyone knew that Harry Potter and Rita Skeeter hadn't liked each other ever since he was still a student at Hogwarts, so most people wouldn't be looking for a _collaboration _between them. "Won't it take a lot of money to build these schools?"

Harry smiled and sat back in his chair in the Ministry Atrium, where he had decided to hold this first press conference on the subject of the schools. Technically, there was an exemption in the laws that allowed anyone to do that, but most people didn't know about it. There had turned out to be something good, after all, about all the boring and musty old paperwork that Thorin had had him read.

Besides Skeeter, about ten other reporters and sixteen Aurors were in attendance, plus any number of Ministry employees and people with business there who had detoured over when they saw what was going on. Harry thought it wasn't a bad crowd, and he sat there pretending to think deeply about Skeeter's question and considered their faces. Most of them looked reluctantly fascinated.

"Well, of course, that's what pure-blood fortunes are for," Harry said at last, when he thought that they had built anticipation up to the sticking-point and Skeeter would probably fall off her chair if she leaned forwards anymore. "And I don't think my father would disapprove of the way that I plan to use his. He _did _marry a Muggleborn witch, after all."

Skeeter nodded as though that was a point of serious importance. "But surely your money can't do it all alone, Mr. Potter?"

Harry smiled and opened his mouth. This was his cue to mention the fundraising efforts that he'd already started, mostly among people who either sincerely believed in the cause or could make profitable alliances with him.

"Of course not. He'll also have mine."

Harry turned around and let his jaw drop before he could help himself. _This _wasn't part of their meticulously planned onslaught of questions, especially because he'd thought Draco was still out of the country.

But no, there he was, walking across the Atrium in his best grey dress robes, all wrapped up in the shining character of Draco Malfoy, Philanthropist. Cameras clicked, and more quills came out and began scribbling down pertinent details. Harry could just imagine all the different ways this dramatic entrance would show up in the papers tonight.

"Hullo, Harry," Draco added, and squeezed his shoulder with one hand before dropping into a seat beside him. Harry knew that seat hadn't been there a moment before, but not even Auror training could keep up with the quickness of Draco's wandwork, sometimes. "I think it's a worthy cause," Draco went on, turning to face Skeeter and offering her a smile that made more of the cameras click to capture it. Harry wondered about the possibilities of stealing one of those photographs for himself. "We've been separated for too long, and ultimately, that does more damage to our world than letting in Muggleborns and training them in how to properly appreciate pure-blood culture…"

Skeeter purred, and asked more questions. Other reporters started pushing themselves forwards to be heard, and the crowd grew bigger as people became more interested and the rumors spread.

Harry looked up along Draco's arm—from the hand still resting on his shoulder—to his face, and saw enough contentment there that he blinked.

Draco had been with him for a few private conversations when they approached people like Pembroke-Wiltshire, sure. And he had said that he would help, and Harry had counted on his ability to read other pure-bloods. That didn't mean he had ever counted on _this _kind of support.

But it seemed he was going to get it. Even though he hadn't asked for it. Simply because he had been patient and waited.

_That's a great moral lesson, _he thought, and began grinning despite himself.

"And it looks as though Mr. Potter has something to say." Skeeter's quill and parchment swung back around to face him.

"Not really," Harry said, and half-ducked his head, offering a faint shrug and smile to Skeeter. "Mr. Malfoy can go on with what _he _was saying."

Skeeter looked a little disappointed, but returned to that portion of the interview. Harry smiled at Draco, and didn't care who saw. Neither did Draco, if the way that he caught Harry's eye from the corner of his and smiled back was any indication.

Harry looked out over the crowd again. Some of them simply looked intrigued, some looked horrified, and there were suspicious scowls among the Aurors present, some of whom knew that Harry had suspected Draco of being a criminal.

Harry smiled sweetly at them. The introduction of anarchy into his life had worked so far, he thought it would work well to introduce a little into _theirs _and see what happened.

He leaned his head on Draco's shoulder, ignored the faint increase in stares and murmurs, and joined him in their words, their work, their art.

**The End**


End file.
